Should I encrypt my external record drives?

[rosindabow]

Hello - I've never done this before and I was wondering if I were to encrypt the external hard drives would it affect the recording process? I'v never encrypted a drive before ... Thanks.

[HCMarkus]

Does the music incorporate state or personal secrets? If not, I'd recommend against it if for no other reason than the theoretical overhead necessarily incurred by encryption/decryption. Performance has got to take a hit somewhere in the chain.

[EMRR]

Performance will take a large hit, possibly fatal depending on what you're doing, even with SS drives in my experience. I did some experiments last year and backed away quickly.

[mikehalloran]

Performance will take a large hit, possibly fatal depending on what you're doing, even with SS drives in my experience. I did some experiments last year and backed away quickly.

Don't store passwords, credit cards or other personal data on these drives. Yo may have to store license info depending upon what you are putting on them.

If you don't have a reason to encrypt them then there's no need, right?

[Shooshie]

If you don't have a reason to encrypt them then there's no need, right?

But... but... they're watching me!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

In all fairness, the o/p location is "near the blue." So the cops really might be after him.

ENCRYPT EVERYTHING! TWICE!!!

Seriously, Mr. o/p... why would you want to do that? If you don't know, then don't. I certainly can't think of a reason to do so. Encryption slows everything down to a crawl and unless you've got serious military grade concerns about security, just leave things alone!

[Shooshie]

The worst thing that happens with encryption is that you may never see your files again. Two ways that can happen: you forget/lose the password, or it burps some code and collapses into a heap of 1's and 0's. Every time I've tried encrypting things, it has ended badly, and I never lost a password. One day it just wouldn't work. Of course, this was years ago, when these things had not been perfected. But I say avoid encryption unless there's a lot at stake and it's a serious threat.

Shooshie