Debian based operating systems have a graphical frontend for hard drive manipulation called gnome-disks. According to the selected hard drive, there are different options available in the menu. For older drives there is an option to overwrite a disk with zeros and for more recent drives there is a dedicated secure erase option available. What these options have in common is, that it takes multiple hours for doing so.
Unfortunately, the photorec recovery software is able to restore files from hard drive which was overwritten with zeros. Even if this sounds technically not possible some online forums are mention such kind of behavior. To ensure, that the data on the hard drive are really gone it makes sense to combine a secure erase operation with creating a newly encrypted volume. This ensures, that even photorec can't recover former data.
The good news is, that Linux user doesn't have to use command line tools for formatting a drive and creating an encrypted volume. Such kind of operation is fully supported in the gnome-disks software. The program is so powerful, that even less known filesystems like F2FS (flash friendly filesystem) are supported which is a great choice for usb thumb drives. Of course, the user needs to interact with the software carefully, because a simple click on a button can shredder an entire disk.
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