I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I’ve encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.

Whether it’s a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won’t end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.

But that’s just me and I’m curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.

  • EveryMuffinIsNowEncryptedEnglish
    8·
    10 hours ago

    That is a good reason to backup

    This is true.

    but has nothing to do with encryption.

    I disagree with this. If you forget the password for decrypting your drive, then you will have lost “anything on the drive that’s important”. I know because it happened to me long ago, and so now I too have been wary of disk encryption ever since then.

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 hours ago

      Encryption and backup are orthogonal domains. If you don’t understand why, I’m sure you’re not going to take a random strangers’ opinion on the subject.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Mind expanding just a bit through? IMHO it’s not orthogonal in the sense that either your backups are :

        • unencrypted and thus your is are safe (you have copies you can access despite losing your keys) but not secure (someone else can read the content too)
        • encrypted and thus your data is NOT safe if you lose your keys but secure

        Isn’t it?

        • Quazatron@lemmy.world
          1·
          5 hours ago

          I keep backups (regular, incremental, remote) to keep my data safe in case something happens to my local data. This protects me from things like theft, hardware failure, accidental deletion of some important files. Having multiple generations (daily, weekly, monthly) will protect me when I delete some files and only realize weeks later.

          All of this is a separated issue to having encryption or not. I encrypt both local and backup copies, and store the keys in a password manager.

          See what works for you, but don’t confuse the issues.