I have an Ubuntu 20.04 system which is already in use and requires to have its disk encrypted. I have reviewed some methods to perform encryption after installation. But the general suggestion has been that it is easier to backup data, perform a new installation and restore data. I do not have any issue backing up and restoring data in my /home
. However, I have a system that does not work well with Linux and was difficult to setup. On top of that, I also have some libraries that can be tricky to install.
I am trying to see if the following steps will work:
- Create an image of the complete, current system.
- Perform a new installation with disk encryption, using the Ubuntu installer.
- Restore the image.
My plan is to restore a complete image, including the root(/
) directory, so that my hardware setup, other OS settings and libraries are not lost. But I am not certain if such a restoration will affect the encryption of the disk, since it is a complete image coming from an unencrypted disk. I am also not certain how well such a restoration will work. I almost always do a clean install and restore only the user data.
I have seen this answer. But the link leads to a page that says the page on the topic is missing. Does anyone have the details on this idea? I am thinking, this can work by using dd
to transfer data to external disk, then perform an encryption without a new installation, and then run a live disk to transfer back all the contents. But again, not certain how practical this is.
Kindly advise. I am also open to better methods, if available.