This might seem like a bit of a basic question so apologies if it has been covered elsewhere. A search of the forums didn’t seem to help me though.
I have been using endevour for a while and have amassed quite a lot of data both personal and work related and I’m regretting not setting up an encrypted LUKS drive when I first installed it.
I was wondering if there is any way I can encrypt my disk without losing the data on it? A look at KPartitionManager options didn’t seem to help.
I would like to have to not take all my data off the computer with usb sticks as this would be quite tedious but I certainly can’t afford to lose any of it. Anyway I could encrypt whilst avoiding this?
It’s a basic system with 1 hard disk 250GB (sda) and all on 1 partition, no separate partition for home directory or anything like that
If you want to use LUKS you have to give it always a full partition. LUKS encrypts on block device level. And that always deletes all the data on that block device.
I used this for a while because I was in the same position like you and I didnt want to give LUKS a full partition. But that was only for ca. 2 years. At the end of the day I realized that LUKS is the better option, I did a full backup and restored the data on a LUKS partition.
you should have backups that are not connected to the system. You should always backup before doing anything to a drive partition. With Luks as pointed out by @mbod you would have to re partition the drive which will erase everything.
Invest in an external drive or atleast use the cloud. Your putting a lot of faith in that one disk.