Encrypting and decrypting disks with LUKS

An important aspect of security that many people don’t even think about is encryption. As I’m sure you know, backups are essential for business continuity. If a server breaks down, or a resource stops functioning, backups will be your saving grace. But what happens if your backup medium gets stolen or somehow falls into the wrong hands? If your backup is not encrypted, then anyone will be able to view its contents. Some data isn’t sensitive, so encryption isn’t always required. But anything that contains personally identifiable information, company secrets, or anything else that would cause any kind of hardship if leaked should be encrypted. In this section, I’ll walk you through setting up LUKS encryption on an external backup drive.

Before we get into that though, I want to quickly mention the importance of full-disk encryption for your distribution as well. Although this section is going to go over...