submitted 9 hours ago by bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 hours ago

LUKS is generally the least obstrusive once it is running, though setting it up the first time can be confusing.

If you install Debian (or maybe other distros) from scratch, the installer offers to do it for you. Otherwise, basically,

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb xyz  # make an encrypted mapping of raw disk partition
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/mapper/xyz whatever  # initialize new FS on encrypted/mapped partition
mount  /dev/mapper/xyz /yourfs  # mount encrypted partition as a file system
rsync -a oldfs /yourfs   # copy all the files from your old drive

The above is a basic strategy not something to cut and paste. Check the man pages for details, or ask here.

How to quickly integrity check all files: hmm, I'll think about whether there is a neat trick for that, otherwise md5sum everything and compare file by file using "find".

this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026

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