If you've ever messed up with an encrypted disk, you know it feels just like an unrecoverable hard drive crash. Which is exactly what it's supposed to feel lik

If you've ever messed up with an encrypted disk, you know it feels just like an unrecoverable hard drive crash. Which is exactly what it's supposed to feel like, and that's fine if you were aiming for it, but when that isn't what you signed up for, it's pretty much the worst thing ever. It can also feel like a truly nefarious form of vendor lock-in, if you ever try to migrate to another system, and just happen to notice that now, your disk is totally unmountable for some unexplainable reason. This kind of thing can happen when crossing over to an older version of an alternative OS that doesn't know how to negotiate authentication for proprietary encryption formats, or newer formats that weren't supported at the time of the older OS's install. So, for consumer hardware that might be received as a birthday gift, I'd say encrypted by default is a terrible idea. For those not carefully and explicitly warned, storing their stuff on an encrypted disk gone wrong, can be like unintentionally throwing it in the trash, setting it on fire and then flushing it down the toilet, except the toilet is a black hole of no return.