If we do disk encryption on a drive and add some files later on, will they be encrypted or not?
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Please note that disk encryption only helps when somebody steals your hardware. It does NOT prevent rogue software from reading files on disk as the OS de-crypts files for everything running.It would not help against wannacry++, for example. – thecarpy Sep 11 '18 at 10:05
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Yes it will be encrypted.
This is (basically) because of the operating system replacing several calls for file I/O and other operations of ran in encrypted "mode". This paper states on a very basic level what happens:
When a user requests access to a file (i.e., creates, opens, or deletes a file), the request is sent to the operating system input/output (I/O) manager, which forwards the request to the file system manager. The file system manager processes data in blocks.
Life with encryption: business as usual
Most whole disk encryption software operates in conjunction with the file system architecture. It filters I/O operations for one or more file systems or file system volumes. When a drive is encrypted with whole disk encryption for the first time, it converts unencrypted drive blocks into encrypted blocks one at a time (Figure 2).
