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.

  • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    2 days ago

    I don’t have FDE (BitLocker) enabled on my Windows 11 gaming PC. It sits in my house and has nothing on it but video games and video game related shit. I don’t even have my password manager installed for logging in to Steam, GoG or whatever other launcher. I manually type passwords in from the vault on my phone if the app doesn’t support QR code login like discord. Also I paid for this ridiculous m.2 nvme drive, I’m not going to just give up iops bc i want my game install files encrypted.

    I don’t use FDE on my NAS. Again it doesn’t leave my house. I probably should I guess, bc there is some stuff on there that would cause me to have industry certs revoked if they leaked, but idk I don’t. Everything irreplaceable is backed up off site, but the down time it would take to rebuild my pirated media libraries from scratch vs just swapping disks and rebuilding has me leery.

    I have FDE enabled on both my MacBooks. They leave the house with me, it seems to make sense.

    I don’t use FDE on Linux VMs I create on the MacBooks, the disk is already encrypted.

    My iphone doesn’t have the option to not use FDE I don’t think.

    I use encrypted rsync backups to store NAS stuff in the cloud. I use a PGP key on my yubikey to further encrypt specific files on my MacBooks as required beyond the general FDE.