Is full drive encryption a good idea?

Beginners
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So far I have installed Linux Mint and Zorin 16.

When I installed Zorin, it only gave the option of installing the entire drive, but I remembered when I was installing Mint, it suggested to wait and encrypt only /Home and not the entire drive.

Then there are online posts saying the whole drive encryption is not a good idea…

So, is it a good idea to do the drive encryption during installation? If it’s not, should I try to encrypt the /Home drive right after installation?

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Hey, @Ai!
Unless you are traveling with a laptop and expect people to try to hack you, encrypting your drive doesn’t really offer much that you need. Generally, drive or folder encryption will make your life difficult in the case you have to perform a system rescue from a bootable USB.

If you have sensitive files, I would recommend VeraCrypt. It’s a free and extremely powerful encryption software which creates encrypted image files. Once you create an image/container, you can then mount it as a drive from within VeraCrypt. Then, it will act as a normal folder, where you can copy files to and from.

VeraCrypt exists in the repositories, so you can find it on the Software Center or simply type:

sudo apt install veracrypt

It comes with a full GUI, so once you run it, following the instructions will make the process easy. And you can transfer the image files to another system (or just copy them) and install VeraCrypt over there as well, in case you want to reinstall or salvage anything.

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Again, @vasileios, you always have the answer! So lucky to have you with us!

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That’s what I’m here for! I have a few laptops that are still cursing me for running tests on them - to make sure things work! :laughing:

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I also installed Zorin 16 Core, but did not encrypt at all.
I also enabled auto-login. Want to make my Linux experience as effortless and seamless as possible, by eliminating as many hurdles as possible.

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@MarkMcCoskey, I did exactly the same… testing it out on my very old mac desktop… It’s a lot to get use to already, finding where to change settings so I can have a similar layout on desktop and how/where to change all the settings for each little thing…

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