Encrypted USB Disks
On most Linux distributions, you can use the graphical “disks” application to create Luks+ext4 partitons. The defaults are sane. However, it’s still advisable to put random data on the new disk before encryption. If you use USB disks for off-site backups, it’s a good idea to encrypt them: Install the cryptography software: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup Write some random data to your disk (we will assume it’s called /dev/sdx, type “dmesg” after inserting the disk to figure out the device, or if it’s windows formatted and automounted have a look at the output of “mount”): sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdx bs=4K This will taken a long time, maybe a few days (create some IO). A good -shorter- compromise (a day) is: ...