Questions and tips about encrypting disks on EOS

General system Newbie
1

Hi friends.

How do I encrypt hard drives on my KDE EOS? From my KDE Partition Manager or from the Terminal?

Can I encrypt my main hard drive where EOS is installed and also my internal secondary hard drives?

If I encrypt my hard drives (in ext4 format for example), will I be able to mount and access them from other Linux distributions or from other EOS?

Can encrypting hard drives cause any kind of negative problems like poor performance or problems with files or something similar?

Thanks in advance.

2

The Arch Wiki is your friend.

Encrypting Your System: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system

These too: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fscrypt and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VeraCrypt

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3

Generally, speaking, you setup encryption when you install, not after the fact.

Yes, there is a small performance penalty. How much depends on how fast your hardware is.

It is also much harder to recover from errors on an encrypted disk.

4

I’ve never understood the need or desire to encrypt a drive containing your installation, unless you’re really paranoid. Your data is the most important, although not all of that even requires encryption, IMHO.

When I partition a drive on a computer, I always leave an empty partition to be used to create a Veracrypt partition. I keep everything that I consider private under my Veracrypt partition.

As dalto has stated, you introduce a lot of complexity when you encrypt a drive containing your OS. You may encounter an unsolvable error and be forced to perform a complete reinstallation.

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