Enabling Encyption on an Unencrypted Alpha

[Paras (Paras Shah)]

@gja

How difficult would it be to get things to work as per the blog post?

I surmise it is not difficult and eventually everything will be enrcypted. But as @ibrahim mentioned, quoting below, doing this will give a false sense of security to the users. When they turn on encryption, they’d expect everything to be encrypted, right away.

@ibrahim

Badger writes are append only. We never modify a file once it is written to the disk. If we were to support enabling encrytion on an unencrypted data directory, only the new data would be encrypted and the existing data will be stored in plain text. This is a serious problem. When someone enables encryption, they wouldn’t want half the data to be encrypted and half the data to unencrypted. I propose we do not allow users to enable encryption on existing. The old data might get garbage collected/compacted and re-written in encrypted format but there is a possibity that this might not (never) happen for a long time.