Easiest way to make an encrypted external hard drive?

[seanh]

I did an rsync of my encrypted ~/.Private directory to an external
drive. It took ages, but further backups will be incremental so not as
bad. I figured out how to mount and decrypt this backup to recover
files from it. It's very tricky, but quick once you know how.

The advantage of this approach is simplicity. You simply backup the
Private dir with a single command and you have an encrypted backup of
everything. No need to worry about whether or not you included all
valuable data in the backup, or whether or not you excluded all
sensitive data from it.

The disadvantage is wasted storage space. Since you're backing up the
encrypted files, there's no way to specify rsync rules to exclude
giant unwanted directories such as Downloads and Trash. These account
for more than half of my storage space used!

If on an Ubuntu system with multiple users with encrypted home
directories, if you want a single backup job run by root to backup all
users then I think backing up the encrypted copies in /home/.ecryptfs
is your only option. There's no simple way that root can backup the
user's files unencrypted in order to exclude certain directories from
the backup, because only the users have the passwords to decrypt their
homes, root can only see the encrypted files.

On 5 February 2011 16:44, David Fletcher <dave at thefletchers.net> wrote:
> I'd say whether or not you need to do this depends on how much is in
> your home directory.
>
> What I do is, keep all my music, photographs, virtual machines and
> anything else that's big in a separate directory off the root directory.
> Only my email, letters, spreadsheets, scanned documents and other things
> that are not too large but which I would like to keep private are kept
> in my home directory.
>
> I then use a script while logged in as a separate administrator to
> create a tar file of everything in /home/. At the moment that makes
> about a 2GB file. I use gpg to do a symmetrical encryption of this file
> which I can then copy onto flash drives. One of these is stored in the
> car glove box as an off site backup. Of course if you've encrypted your
> home directory then personally, I'd recommend making sure you can
> restore a backup of everything to another computer when the hard drive
> dies.
>
> The separate directory for the big files gets backed up to my server by
> rsync a couple of times a day.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
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