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 meant if I lose my encryption key I lose the data on the disk.
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.)
How would backing up help with that, though, assuming the backups are also encrypted?
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?
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.