Does Ubuntu store all personal data inside /home?

Does Ubuntu store all personal data inside /home?

I'm getting a netbook today, and I intend to dual boot Ubuntu and XP in it while encrypting the hard drive for obvious reasons. Problem is: I know that encrypting the entire harddrive in a dualboot system is gonna give me headaches, so I'm just gonna encrypt my /home partition in Ubuntu (which is going to be the main OS). And that leads to my question:

Asked by: Guest | Views: 175

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"There shouldn't be any personal data outside the /home directory that a reasonable person would be bothered about.

It is however possible that a rubbish application developer has, at some stage, decided to keep some files that you would want to have included in your encrypted partition somewhere else, and that nobody has ever picked up on it.

Whether encrypting your /home is enough depends on how paranoid you are. For example, consider encrypting your swap as it contains straight dumps of memory and is not normally wiped after use, so could be read by some recovery tools. But if someone gets hold of your machine how likely are they to start trying such things? If you are Barack Obama and Chinese spies get your computer, you may have a problem, but if it contains the novel you are writing and is stolen by some druggies after selling it for a fix, you probably don't have too much to worry about."

Guest [Entry]

"Consider that a lot of stuff you may not want outsiders to find may show up in /tmp.

If I were you, I would follow Peter Eisentraut's suggestion and encrypt the whole drive."