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.

  • Quazatron
    2•11 hours ago

    That is a good reason to backup, but has nothing to do with encryption.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•11 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
        0•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.

        • @[email protected]
          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
            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.

      • @mholiv
        1•11 hours ago

        That is a good reason to backup, but has nothing to do with encryption.

        (For real though I have a backup of all of my drive LUKS headers stored on several media types on and off site.)

        • @keegomatic
          1•5 hours ago

          How would backing up help with that, though, assuming the backups are also encrypted?

          I meant if I lose my encryption key I lose the data on the disk.

          If they lose the key they lose the data in the backups, too. So that concern is not a good reason to backup, in my eyes.

          Then, if the backups are not encrypted, then doesn’t that undermine the value of encrypting your drive/user data partition in the first place?

          • @mholiv
            1•4 hours ago

            Just backup the LUKs header files. No need to encrypt them as they’re inherently secure as the hard drives they would originally reside on.