Advantages
EncFS offers several advantages over other disk encryption software simply because each file is stored individually as an encrypted file somewhere else in the host's directory tree.
- EncFS "volumes" do not occupy a fixed size — they grow and shrink as more files are added to or removed from the mountpoint.
- It is possible for some directories on the mountpoint to exist on different physical devices, if a filesystem is mounted over one of the subdirectories in the source directory.
- Backup utilities can back up only the files that have changed in the source directory.
- Corruption of data is more isolated. Data corruption of filedata is local to a single file and data corruption of the filesystem can be corrected with a reliable filesystem repair utility like fsck. In some whole-disk encryption systems, one or both of these attributes are not present.
- Since file modifications shine through to the underlying file system, various optimizations by the operating system are still possible unlike with full disk encryption. For example, passing information about released space (TRIM) can improve performance of SSD drives.
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