So like a doofus, ive never really done encryption on any of my PCs/drives. With the way stuff is going, now I want all of it encrypted. The issue is I have so much data from over the years and everything ive read says it deletes everything when you encrypt.
For me it would mostly be my desktop and my nas.
Is it really a matter of, I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs to copy everything over to, encrypt, copy it all back? What’s the best (Linux) software for a mass copy task like that to be sure it works correctly?


No that makes perfect sense. I know losing the key means by by
I do have a backup. The issue is I need a backup for that one if I were to encrypt this.
People will get all 3-2-1 about backups tbh you can just have a backup you know works and an older backup you know works stored somewhere else.
What are you trying to accomplish?
I figured I should encrypt stuff in case my shit gets stolen was all. Not a huge concern though.
If you’re just worried about your computer or whatever getting stolen, whole partition encryption at rest is the way to go.
That process also requires that you log out of or turn off your computer when not using it. Not everyone understands that part. If your computer is on and logged in when it gets stolen then someone could just not turn it off or log out and read all the data.
Of course that’s assuming you mean stolen by a criminal as opposed to confiscated. That’s a different thing altogether.