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.
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.
Bittlocker is a pain. Simply booting a maintainance disk requied me to use the recovery codes to get back into windows.
It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.
I assume it has something to do with how secure boot, the TPM, and Bitlocker interact.