Linux

I encrypt all my drives. Me and the people I know get occasionally raided by the police. Plus I guess also provides protection for nosy civilians who get their hands on my devices. Unlike most security measures, there is hardly any downside to encrypting your drives—a minor performance hit, not noticeable on modern hardware, and having to type in a password upon boot, which you normally have to do anyway.

Full disk encryption on everything. My Servers, PCs etc. Gives me peace of mind that my data is safe even when the device is no longer in my control.

I don't think I encrypt my drives and the main reason is it's usually not a one-click process. I'm also not sure of the benefits from a personal perspective. If the government gets my drives I assume they'll crack it in no time. If a hacker gets into my PC or a virus I'm assuming it will run while the drive is in an unencrypted state anyway. So I'm assuming it really only protects me from an unsophisticated attacker stealing my drive or machine.

Please educate me if I got this wrong.

Edit: Thanks for the counter points. I'll look into activating encryption on my machines if they don't already have it.

Its that simple.

I can expand my own creativity and store every thought and creative Art, without anybody being able to find out after my death or while someone raids me.

Maybe I stored an opinion against some president, and maybe the government changed its working, which allows police to raid someone for little suspection.

You never know if you ever have something to hide. While things are okay now and today, it might be highly illegal tomorrow.

Those are ideas. But generally its only about the feeling of privacy.

I don't wanna risk losing anything on the drive thats important .

My Laptop and Phone have encrypted drives, my Desktop doesn't.

My issue is that I can never remember "a couple more commands" for the life of me. And I use Arch BTW, so the likelihood of me needing those is a bit higher than usual.

I don't but admittedly I don't do much stuff on my laptop that's super secure. it's mainly for gaming and the odd programming project.

i'd really like to. but there is ONE big problem:

Keyboard layouts.

seriously

I hate having to deal with that. when I set up my laptop with ubuntu, I tried at least 3 thymes to make it work, but no matter what I tried I was just locked out of my brand-new system. it cant just be y and z being flipped, I tried that, maybe it was the french keyboard layout (which is absolutely fucked) or something else, but it just wouldnt work.

On my mint PC I have a similar problem with the default layout having weird extra keys and I just sort of work around that, because fuck dealing with terminals again. (when logged in it works, because I can manually change it to the right one.)

Now I do have about a TerraByte of storage encrypted, just for the... more sensitive stuff...

While dealing with the problems I stumbled across a story of a user who had to recover their data using muscle-memory, a broken keyboard, the same model of keyboard and probably a lot of patience. good luck to that guy.

I made the mistake of not setting up encryption on my main 45TB zfs pool so I'm currently backing up everything on there to tape so I can recreate the pool (also need to change from mirrored to raidz) and then copying everything back to the drives. Although writing and reading each are around 6 days continuesly. Didn't want to bite the bullet and pay more then I absolutely had to and only got a LTO-4 drive and tapes.

I encrypt everything, with unique complex passwords, that I have a safe mnemonic system for remembering and retrieving.

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.

I started encrypting once I moved to having a decent number of solid state drives as the tech can theoretically leave blocks unerased once they go bad. Before that my primary risk factor was at end of life recycling which I usually did early so I wasn’t overly concerned about tax documents/passwords etc being left as I’d use dd to write over the platters prior to recycling.

Almost everything that can be is: laptops, desktop, servers (LUKS), phone (grapheneos)

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.