Disk encryption software
Disk encryption generally refers to wholesale encryption that operates on an entire volume mostly transparently to the user, the system, and applications. This is generally distinguished from file-level encryption that operates by user invocation on a single file or group of files, and which requires the user to decide which specific files should be encrypted. Disk encryption usually includes all aspects of the disk, including directories, so that an adversary cannot determine content, name or size of any file. It is well suited to portable devices such as laptop computers and thumb drives which are particularly susceptible to being lost or stolen. If used properly, someone finding a lost device cannot penetrate actual data, or even know what files might be present.
Disk encryption
Also, most of full disk encryption schemes don't protect from data tampering (or silent data corruption, i.e. bitrot). That means they only provide privacy, but not integrity. Block cipher-based encryption modes used for full disk encryption are not authenticated encryption themselves because of concerns of the storage overhead needed for authentication tags. Thus, if tampering would be done to data on the disk, the data would be decrypted to garbled random data when read and hopefully errors may be indicated depending on which data is tampered with (for the case of OS metadata – by the file system; and for the case of file data – by the corresponding program that would process the file). One of the ways to mitigate these concerns, is to use file systems with full data integrity checks via checksums (like Btrfs or ZFS) on top of full disk encryption. However, cryptsetup started experimentally to support authenticated encryption