A long format which is also called low level format on your Windows environment is similar in capabilities to sanitize. However, as the name indicates, it is long especially on larger card densities. It could take over an hour to do a long format on a 1TB card while Refresh Pro does it in less than a minute. On Mac OS, you can do a secure format level 2 to accomplish the same thing as sanitize. But again, it takes a long time to perform that task compared to Refresh Pro and formatting on a computer will not report the useful life left on a card.