I'd like to destroy a hard drive with a 50 caliber rifle... because I love guns... or thermite since it is nice to look at and should melt the metal which would make data impossible to recover.
In terms of just deleting data and not physically annihilating the thing, I personally just like shredding files and writting over freespace. Which I use Privazer for. WipeFile to wipe individual files. Normally with NATO Standard 7x. Gutmann is way over kill but I might use it just because I feel like it sometimes.
Yeah, Recuva seeing things leftover is not an indication that the file/files will still be readable or usable to any extent. It may still bring up file names, but there's a way around that. Any sensitive information you think about overwriting, rename the files to some random and mundane names before you do the overwrite. That way, if these file names do show up in Recuva, they won't easily be recognized as anything very interesting.
I can verify this since I've tried to recover files before and Recuva acted like it could recover them but couldn't. Some image for example would be mostly broken and only show a small fraction of what it should, etc. In fact, I've never found a tool that could recover any file fully with my excessive cleaning habits. When I shred a file that thing isn't being recovered.
DBan is pretty much all you need..but who can pass up a chance to play with thermite? I mean, come on, it's a beautiful process to watch
Of course all this doesn't take into consideration ISP logs if we're talking about hiding things. Thermite and DBan won't fix that one, lol.
But as you said, if there was information on the internet about the file(s), there very little or just plain nothing you can do to cover your tracks. Even a VPN for the most part won't ultimately help unless there just happens to be no logging left over or no logging at all which seems very unlikely even if they claim that.
