Erasing parts of a partition or file system
To erase all traces of what was written earlier (in what is now free space) is not a good idea.
If other files are still there, these files may be very interesting for an intruder.
Modern file systems with journaling will often have the information in more than one location, and erasing the memory space, which was used for a file is not enough in this case.
See man shred
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way
to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this
assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred
is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file sys‐
tem modes:
* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some
writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems
* file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS
server
* file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3
clients
* compressed file systems
In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and
shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode,
which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both the
data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual.
Ext3 journaling modes can be changed by adding the data=something
option to the mount options for a particular file system in the
/etc/fstab file, as documented in the mount man page (man mount).
In addition, file system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies
of the file that cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded file
to be recovered later.
Wipe a whole partition (with its file system) or a whole drive
shred and other overwrite tools/methods can be used in a better way to make old information harder to read, when you wipe a whole partition or a whole mass storage device (the whole drive) instead of individual files or the drive space between the files.
Encrypt the whole file system
But I think that the best way is to encrypt the whole file system with a very good password. This way nothing, not the current files, and not deleted files are possible to read without the password.
Warning: if you forget the password, the data are lost for you too. If the file system is damaged, it is difficult to recover. So you need a good backup, that is stored in a safe place, and a good backup routine to keep your backup up to date.
Ubuntu's installer has an option 'LVM with encryption', which uses LUKS encryption for the root file system. This is often referred to as 'encrypted disk'. See this link,
Install (entire disk with lvm and encryption)
