When i was creating a new partition i saw the option to encrypt the partition. It asked me for a password and of course i put one in. Now it says its encrypted but im curious to what exactly this did for me. I figured it would ask for a password whenever i want to access that partition but thats not the case...it lets me right in as long as the permissions are set for each user. I did notice a Lost+Found folder that I can only access from root currently. What exactly did encrypting the partition do for me here? Thanks in advance.

Are you sure it's mounted? It shouldn't mount the partition unless you enter the password during the boot sequence. With my system my /home partition is encrypted. During boot up their is a 5 sec window where I have to enter the password to decrypt and mount /home.

i never rebooted.....ill do it now. thanks

Encrypting a partition makes you sure, that no one can mount the partition without knowing the password. So if your drive gets somehow stolen there's no chance that someone reads your data. However, after mounting the encrypted partition it behaves just like an ordinary partition and gives no additional protection.

Lost+Found has nothing to do with encryption. It's a folder used on ext2 and ext3 file systems to store data recovered from file system after a crash.