Security is a misunderstood thing and media hype can cause anxiety. Perhaps bitlocker is safe to use. But without experience and knowing the torrid history of how the US handled it with backdoors in chips etc. Two problems with encryption are performance and the user. Encryption is a computationally intensive task so your computer takes a performance hit. The user problem is the point that the user interacts with encrypted files, at some point the file needs to be unencrypted so you can use it and thats when its also copyable for malicious software. Hackers are not usually interested in encrypted files unless they know whats in them, such as a customer database from an ISP where it might be worth trying to decrypt as it will contain personal details (always sellable to marketing spammers), banking details/passwords (for identity theft etc).
Hackers will rarely ever try to get into your machine remotely themselves unless you have publically disclosed you have something they want, its just not worth the time and effort. But if they have the skills to make use of say a found vulnerability on a particular database then they will try to find such databases. its a matter of trying different method to find and get to it. But name/address/phone details are commodities for easy cash, login/passwords too and its much easier using a form of malware to do that.
For example, you get an email claiming to be from your bank so you click on the link to check your account (because its easier than going to google, finding your bank and clicking on their link) depends on what the link does the end result from the computers point of view is you've given something equal permission to you to do something, that thing can then silently contact the internet and install things because it has permission which it can pass onto other things to do stuff to. So while you may not notice it immediately and you might think clicking what looks like a link (after all how many people can read/write HTML and javascript?) so your computer may now be running low impact processes which are sending every keystroke you type out to be stored somewhere. at some point you will probably log into a website or bank or whatever and now your login and password are stored somewhere by the malware for a hacker to easily browse through and find at their leisure. Over time a bunch of these things will build up on your computer, they wont damage anything but the machine slows over time and people buy a new machine to upgrade and everything seems so much faster but the cycle starts again. This happens even if you have some form of virus scanner which is a whole can of worms i wont rant about.
The bigest problem with whole disk encryption, is what if the drive develops errors? Everything can be locked away and inaccessible forever. Having a NAS can give you a secure storage area requiring login to access. I can highy recommend the
Corsair Survivor USB drives, I've got several over the years as I outgrew their capacity and they have been perfectly reliable and stood up to all sorts of accidentaly abuse. Well worth paying extra for this reliability to protect some data that can make life difficult if my computers burnt down and just made sense to set up a mountable virtual drive with TrueCrypt in case I lost the drive or it was stolen. I went through a period of unemployment and found it handy to keep my resume, references and digital exmple of work on me at all times just in case and protected in case i lost it on the bus so nobody could get my home details from it. Even just as a secure backup its a good solution, plus being self contained it mounts itself from any windows computer with a usb port, doesnt need software to be installed.
Perhaps a more practical solution is looking at Virtualbox (free) which lets you create a virtual computer as a large file. So you can run a Windows or Linux environment from a file like its own computer. then you can copy the file somewhere to backup, its handy for testing software before you install onto your main machine if you are uncertain and the virtual machine has full access to your computer's hardware.
If you want to dabble int encryption I will suggest avoiding full disk encryption and go for something that will create a mountable virtual drive (again a single large file say 8GB in size that appears as an 8GB drive to your computer) so you can interact with it just like any drive and see for yourself if its performance is usable. Keeping personal details safe is a good idea, using it to protect funny videos of cats jumping into boxes not a suitable use (youtube has them backed up). As an exercise its good to go through to help you decide the true importance of your files: can someone steal your identity or drain your bank account if they get this file? if yes it should be stored securely, If your house burns down what files are absolutely vital to get your life back on track? secure them. etc. I know its a pain in the butt when a computer dies and needs to be replaced, good backups help that but some things could be a hinderance to real life if you lost them. Whatever you try do it on a COPY of files you wont be devastated to lose so you can get comfortable using the encrypted folder and ensure programs get access it (I found this a problem in the early days), it should be as unintrusive to how you work as possible. You might find it is handy to use depending how you work. Similiarly, I dont know if they exist these days, real-time compression on drives and folders can help you gain a bit of drive space back, but there are similar tradeoffs in practice. (omg I have discs of master images about 20yrs old all fractally compressed that I dont think I can open now). Yes a lot of the thing I recommend not doing I have done myself in the past, much of my experience comes from actual experiences. so I hope to save people some stress and put them onto a workable solution quicker. good luck
