If I encrypt my home folder during installation, can I do another clean installation over the entire hard drive?
Solution 1:
Encryption won't interfere with your next installation at all.
I've used full disk and home folder encryption for several years now, but I've never noticed any difference in performance. The most significant bottleneck in retrieving encrypted data involves getting the bits off of your disk. By comparison, decryption is so fast it's almost always unnoticeable.
After logging in (or entering your password) you can backup or copy files from your encrypted drive/folder exactly as you normally would, without any extra considerations.
Full-disk and home folder encryption are transparent in most cases.
Solution 2:
- You can either use the ecnrypted hard drive and install into it, or you could wipe the entire drive and install unencrypted. Both work fine.
- For very disk I/O intensive stuff, you may be able to notice issues.
- The general way this is done* is that when you grab them from the encrypted drive they are decrypted on the fly (I'm thinking TrueCrypt etc) so when you save them they will be unencrypted.
*some encryption tools are more strict and won't let this happen. Usually these are only used in restricted environments, or as part of data leakage/loss prevention