So.. if there is a bad block on the HDD, what can survive better?not using FDE (full disc encryption)using FDE - since the whole disk has 1 partition - the encrypted one, isn't it more likely to loose all data if there is a HDD error, ex.: bad block?
Does using full-disk encryption affect the probability of losing data in case of storage errors?
filesystems;encryption;storage
No, I mean yes, I mean... a little bit of both.If a block is bad, the data of that block is gone. Whether the block contained encrypted data or not, is not relevant at that point. It doesn't make a difference.Of course there are special cases. If your encryption has a metadata header, such as LUKS does, and the bad block happens to be one that holds your encryption key, then that single bad block can render the entire disk unreadable and the entire data lost. If the machine is still running and has the container open, don't reboot without writing down the key first... (e.g. dmsetup table --showkeys).But the same can happen to you in an unencrypted scenario. If critical filesystem metadata goes bad, your files are probably gone. And rescue tools like PhotoRec that try to make sense of remaining clear text data may not be able to yield satisfactory results (depending on whether you stored files in a known format, fragmentation and other things).In the end no matter what you do, you always need backups. After all, a HDD may just as well die completely rather than have just a bad block here and there.