Planning for Disk Encryption

[T o n g <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com>]

Hi, 

It's well known that fail to plan means plan to fail. But when comes to 
Disk Encryption, I did not see any reasonably planning on disk failure, 
even though I've googled extensively. 

My understanding/impression is that with Full Disk Encryption, even a 
single bad sector will have a much larger impact than itself and might 
ruin the whole disk. That's a rather big risk right there, but I haven't 
found article on how to cope with the problem. 

To make it more "interesting"/"practical", consider planning for normal 
home user. They differ from big corporation in that, big corporation will 
throw away disks once SMART *indicates* the disk is failing, while normal 
home user will try still to use it until it fails massively, which hardly 
happens. What I used to do is to mark the bad sectors in inodes as bad and 
not using them any more. Works great, and I found a similar practice on 
the net too -- http://www.linuxforum.com/threads/3265-bad-sectors-on-disk, 
"I have some bad sectors on my hard drive. What I did was to make a 
partition on the part which has the bad sectors. Then I just do not use 
that particular partition. It's been two years now. The rest of the hard 
drive is still working well, 12-16 hours every day, seven days a week." 

So, what would you plan for normal home users on disk failure for Disk 
Encryption? How to cope with it? 

Thanks