Encryption Questions

[Khoomn]

So I'm thinking about adding a 2TB NVME drive ontop of my current 1TB SSD and 4TB HDD. Once I get the drive I want to encrypt my entire system with veracrypt. My question is, when I do that, would previous data from the drives still be unencrypted. If you dont understand what I mean, I'm talking about when a drive gets corrupted and you send it to a data recovery place, they can recover data and when you delete files, they are still there and you have to rewrite over the data to make it fully go away. Would that still be the case for my drives when I encrypt them, the data still being there and able to be recovered from when they werent encrypted?

[emosun]

to my knowledge most drive encryption software encrypts the entire drive including the empty space meaning there wouldn't be anything to recover

[Khoomn]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

to my knowledge most drive encryption software encrypts the entire drive including the empty space meaning there wouldn't be anything to recover

Do you know if specifically veracrypt does it? If not i can probably look through their documentation

[emosun]

Just now, Khoomn said:

Do you know if specifically veracrypt does it? If not i can probably look through their documentation

if it has an option to encrypt the entire drive then that is what it would need to do

[Khoomn]

4 minutes ago, emosun said:

if it has an option to encrypt the entire drive then that is what it would need to do

Alright good to know. Thanks

[OhioYJ]

3 minutes ago, Khoomn said:

Alright good to know. Thanks

 

Veracrypt  (Truecrypt as well)  encrypts everything, even free space. So if you encrypt the entire drive, partition, or create an encrypted file container, the entire thing is encrypted. It will all look like random data.  This is why when you go to create the partition, drive, file container initially it can take a long time depending on the size as it is writing over the entire drive.