Anybody know a guide or reading material on learning how to encrypt hard drives ?
Depends on what sort of underlying file system you want to use on the drive. For Linux filesystems (ext4, btrfs, zfs etc), here’s a good start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt
For NTFS, BitLocker is already baked in to Windows.
I’ve nothing against NSA_KEY nor Bitlocker, but anything in context with GAFAM I take it with grain of salt.
Look into the dm-crypt Linux kernel module.
Probably not what you’re looking for but Linux Mint has the option to encrypt your drive when you first install it. It’s as easy as clicking “yes” and setting a password.
Last I checked, Mint only allows you to encrypt your home partition. I know that Fedora supports full disk encryption via a toggle at installation.
Mint only allows you to encrypt your home partition.
Lol WTF? Cryptsetup has been a thing for what? Twenty years?
encrypting /home is good if you have multiple users also eCryptfs is also thing for several years just like LUKS/dm-crypt
Perhaps you had another partition with an operating system on the same disk, which prevented full disk encryption? If installing on an empty disk, most distros offer full disk encryption by default.
That definitely wasnt the case when I was last installing Mint, as I don’t dual boot and always select the option to overrite the entire disk during installation. The way I remember it, it says “[checkbox] Encrypt your home partition” with no other options. Not sure if there is an equivalent to Fedora’s settings or an advanced mode (like blivet-gui) to setup full disk encryption manually.
Holy shit, what kind of pirated material are you hiding? :P
encrypting the drive mainly prevent an eventual thief from getting access to your files, including personal documents and web cookies, since system passwords does absolutely nothing against someone with access to your hard drive, and that includes paswords you may have writtend on a file that you later deleted, where as if you encrypted your drive, there is nothing you have to worry about but to buy another computer if it is stolen
Could be a hard drive of normal pirated movies and going across the border. But encrypting it would be dumb anyway.
Also, it’s just a normal security measure. If pirating is illegal in your country it will always be better to encrypt the incriminating material in case of a search warrant.
How do they know it’s pirated? If I rip my own DVD/blu-ray, put it in folders, and download subtitles. How does that look different from a completed torrent?
