Re: Should I encrypt servers at my home lab?
Hi,
On Sun, Oct 05, 2025 at 01:25:52AM +0000, whiteman808@paraboletancza.org wrote:
> I want to store on NAS a lot of random downloaded stuff like movies,
> music and also my backups of servers.
Only you can decide if it's worth it or not.
Full disk encryption will help you mainly against unsophisticated
burglars who probably aren't even interested in your data but who might
just sell your hardware to someone nosy and technically inclined. This
is why smartphones use encryption and it's encouraged on laptops -
opportunistic theft or accidental loss are a significant risk. Buy
used HDDs on Ebay and see how often they have data still on them.
It won't help you against your government who will just compel you by
law to give up your passphrase. If your data's worth the prison time,
you're already in a threat category beyond what we can advise you on.
It won't help you against a sophisticated targeted attacker who will
just infiltrate your life in other ways. Probably you aren't that
interesting to any attacker but only you know that.
FDE will be slightly less performant, more complicated, more of a hassle
to use¹, and easier to accidentally destroy. That doesn;t mean you
shouldn't use it. Only you can decide.
Thanks,
Andy
¹ e.g. need to unlock at boot - are you okay with your NAS being locked
waiting for a passphrase if you aren't home when it comes back from a
power cut or other unexpected reboot?
Yes there's plenty of technical solutions to this problem you would
create.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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