Easiest way to make an encrypted external hard drive?

[David Fletcher]

I'd say whether or not you need to do this depends on how much is in
your home directory.

What I do is, keep all my music, photographs, virtual machines and
anything else that's big in a separate directory off the root directory.
Only my email, letters, spreadsheets, scanned documents and other things
that are not too large but which I would like to keep private are kept
in my home directory.

I then use a script while logged in as a separate administrator to
create a tar file of everything in /home/. At the moment that makes
about a 2GB file. I use gpg to do a symmetrical encryption of this file
which I can then copy onto flash drives. One of these is stored in the
car glove box as an off site backup. Of course if you've encrypted your
home directory then personally, I'd recommend making sure you can
restore a backup of everything to another computer when the hard drive
dies.

The separate directory for the big files gets backed up to my server by
rsync a couple of times a day.

Dave