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As for the cloud, I store nothing sensitive on there. I used truecrypt, but now I find VeraCrypt easier to use and install. I lost my last installer of truecrypt, and I don't trust the ones floating around.
VeraCrypt hasn't been audited yet. This is a bad thing :)
Most of my other installations (Mac, Linux, FreeBSD) are encrypted (LVM, ZFS, etc) or will be soon.
To be honest this only really helps against casual attackers (lost/stolen machine) because much of my personal data is in OneDrive which will offer me no protections against governments or determined individuals.
I'm running Debian, so I have LUKS full-disk encryption running; I consider it a sine qua non of running a personal computer. I wish it were a bit easier to enable per-user encrypted home directories as well (yes, layered: CPUs are fast, and security is worth the cost), but … I'm lazy.
If you've got the requisite ecryptfs packages installed, you can just run something like: "adduser --encrypt-home newusername" and there you go. It works on top of any filesystem, because it encrypts on a per-file basis.
Advantages:
- OS neutral
- Seemingly as fast as running 'unencrypted'
(I assume performance is identical, the only
difference being the passphrase is stored in
my head rather than the BIOS)
- Limited to an 8-char (!) ASCII passphrase
- I've no idea how secure it really is
- Can't audit the algorithm (not that I have
the technical ability to)Yup, encrypt every time. Otherwise, they may be able to snag your SSH RSA keys off of the hard drive, and if you've password protected it, they can try to brute force it. Also, it helps safeguard against border patrol wanting to access your data while traveling.
It's tangential, but while on the topic of securing lost laptops, you should also password-protect GRUB and BIOS. Ideally, all three will use different passwords that are relatively long. Properly securing these elements in addition to having full-disk encryption will make your lost laptop useless to the would-be thieves.