That's why you should have up-to-date backups.

If you're doing FDE, you should be encrypting your backups as well. It can be relatively trivial, depending on your backup setup.

This is all good, until you get any kind of disk corruption. Good luck getting any of your data back.

If my encrypted disk becomes corrupted and then corrupts my unencrypted backup, what's the difference?

A good backup, e.g. Time machine, lets you restore feom before the corruption. A backup on an encrypted disk risks the entire backup volume being corrupted and unusable in one go, thus making it a very brittle backup.

I'm assuming that a corrupted encrypted file is totally unusable here, and now that I think more about it I'm not sure - encryption with chained blocks would mean errors have a larger affect than just at the error site, wouldn't it?

I use FDE on my laptop. I recently wrote up how I handle encrypted backups:

https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

Why am I down voted?

My laptop HD was encrypted, it got corrupted, and I lost the entire drive. If even a few bytes are corrupted, you are SOL.

Luckily, I had an offsite backup (unencrypted) I'm just warning people about the dangers of not keeping an unecrypted backup.

Why isn't your offsite backup encrypted too? Yes, if your data is corrupted, and your backups are corrupted, then you lose your data. That's the case regardless of whether or not you're using encryption.

I use FDE on my laptop. My backups are also encrypted. I use duplicity which basically tars up the files and then encrypts using GnuPG. It only tars up the changes between each run, so I have incremental backups, and version history of every single file on my system. All encrypted - https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

> Luckily, I had an offsite backup (unencrypted)

Don't call that luck. You should be proud of yourself.