It Depends(tm). Some encryption schemes will cascade bit errors (aka a flipped bit somewhere early on will fail everything and you’ll potentially lose access t

It Depends(tm). Some encryption schemes will cascade bit errors (aka a flipped bit somewhere early on will fail everything and you’ll potentially lose access to the entire archive). Those also are terrible for random access. But usually extremely secure. Most sane ones for backups use a variant of block level encryption where you’ll lose at most a block worth of data from a bit flip. Which hopefully whatever archiving format you’re using can recover from, since long term storage already has that issue. Way back, I had issues like this (unstable hardware) and piped tar through encryption (I forget what library - it might have been gpg haha) then rsbep2 to avoid problems. It recovered from corrupted blocks at least twice.