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?
Others mentioned LUKS. That’s IMO the best whole-partition encryption for Linux. I set up LUKS every time I install a system.
But pls be aware of the limitations! As long as the LUKS partition is mounted, the data is available. That’s prob almost the whole time your computer is running. For most people. Even if you log out of your user account. So this only protects your data if the computer is off. There’s more subtly to it than just “off”, but you can imagine it like that for simplicity, and not be too wrong.
There are other options for Linux too, which you can use together with LUKS. Ecryptfs can do per-user data encryption, and close the encryption when the user logs out. There are others like that too.