this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I use encryption on laptops, because they can be stolen in the train, bus, etc. On work desktop, I do so as well, because there are many people around. However, on everything that stay at home, I prefer not to use it to simplifiy things and get more performance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't for a pretty simple reason. I have a wife, if something ever happened to me then she could end up a creek without a paddle. So by not having it encrypted then, anyone kinda technical can just pull data off the drive.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

My drives are not encrypted because it's a hassle if things start going wrong. My NAS is software raid so the individual disks mean nothing anyway. The only drive that is encrypted is my backup disk and I'm not really sure if it was needed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yes, and for the life of me I don't understand why there isn't a default LUKS with hibernate partition in the Debian installer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

I would strongly encourage people to encrypt their on site data storage drives even if they never leave the house and theft isn’t a realistic thing that can happen.

The issue is hard drive malfunction. If a drive has sensitive data on it and malfunctions. It becomes very hard to destroy that data.

If that malfunctioning hard drive was encrypted you can simply toss it into an e-waste bin worry free. If that malfunctioning drive was not encrypted you need to break out some heavy tools tool ensure that data is destroyed.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I'm interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it's largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn't have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won't boot it makes recovery more difficult. It's a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I don't encrypt because it's too much effort to learn about it.

Id rather keep my filesystem unencrypted so that I can easily recover from problems and encrypt important files as needed, but let's be real I don't do that either.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Depends on the use case. Definitely for my laptop though. In fact the decryption keys only exist in two places:

  1. Inside my TPM
  2. In a safe deposit box at a bank.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I encrypted my professional laptop's drive in order to prevent access to company data and code in case of theft. And I'll probably encrypt my personal laptop as well because the SSH key can access company code.

As for the desktop, I didn't and probably never will, because theft is less likely and that would be a pain to handle for nightly backups (it is turned on with Wake-on-LAN and then a cron backs up my home directory to my NAS).

Finally, I won't encrypt my NAS as well for the same reason: it would quickly become a hassle as I would have to manually decrypt the drives every time it boots after a power outage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yep. Everything except my server, which needs to be able to boot without my help. Because why not? I rarely ever reboot anything, so it doesn’t really hurt, and if anyone steals my shit they won’t get my wife’s noods.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

No, I don't encrypt. I am a grown ass man and I rarely take my laptop out of my home. I don't have any sensitive data on my various machines. I do use secure and encrypted cloud services to store things that I consider a security risk. Everything else is useless to a potential intruder.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, on my laptop - because I travel with it and confidential data (like from my customers) could land in hands its not supposed to

No, in case of my desktop, because it's easier to access it in case of failure

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

My thinking is similar. I've seen this news story more than once:

laptop stolen containing customer data... hard drive was not encrypted

I don't generally have customer data, but it can happen every once in a while.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I don't encrypt my entire drive, but I do have encrypted directories for my sensitive data. If I did encrypt an entire drive, it would only be the drive containing my data not the system drive.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I encrypt my laptop and desktops and I think it’s worth it. I regret encrypting my servers because they need passwords to turn on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I used to, but then I nuked my install accidentally and I couldn't recover the encrypted data. I nuke my installs fairly regularly. I just did again this past week while trying to resize my / and my /home partitions. I've resigned myself to only encrypting specific files and directories on demand.

My phone is fully encrypted though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Every endpoint device I use is using full disk encryption, yes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Doesn't Pop have that by default? I think others have too.

Anyway, yes for basically everything. Except my servers main partition, because otherwise recovering from crashes would be horribly annoying or unsafe if I'd use cryptssh. And if the dns+dhcp/gateway/VPN server crashes I'd definitely need 22 open.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I do encrypt my drives, and it’s not as transparent in Linux as it is in the others. I’m sure I could get a TPM setup for seamless boots, but I haven’t done that yet.

For mobile drivers, I still encrypt, but that locks them to one OS since LUKS isn’t cross platform. There is VeraCrypt for cross-platform encryption, but that’s one more thing to manage and install.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes. I encrypt because theft. I know PopOS and Mint make it 1-click ez. ...unless of course you want home and root on a separate drives. That scales difficulty real fast. There's plenty of tutorials, and I managed, but I had to patch together different ones to get a basic setup-- Never mind understanding exactly what I did and repeating it (the latest challenge I've been dragging my feet on). I do hope this is an area that sees more development in the near future.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can't easily facilitate that then it's not quite RTM for my use case.

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