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Forum Discussion
Encrypting backups on a external USB drive
I use front view for occasional backups onto USB drives for offsite storage. I also happen to use snapshot for rotating backups daily to another USB drive that is always plugged in.
For my offsite drives I would like to encrypt the contents so that if one of the drives is ever stolen, I can sleep well knowing that the data cannot be retrieved.
Ideally, I would like to use true crypt as the encryption software.
The only scheme I can think of is the following. I would like opinions on he feasibility of this scheme, suggestions on implementation or a better idea.
1) Format the USB drive as ext3
2) backup using front view to an unencrypted part of the external USB drive.
3) Remove the hard drive from the readynas duo and plug into my desktop PC (or my macbook pro). This step is needed since I will need full read write access to the ext3 volume.
4) Create a Truecrypt volume and mount it.
5) Create and account that has the same uuid and permissions as the administrator or root account on the readynas (here I will need some help!!)
6) Under this newly created account move the entire front view backup into the encrypted volume. (i.e. mv FullB /mount/xxxx)
Any opinions on this approach? Is there an easier approach? If not I could use some advice on step 5 to ensure the linux account has appropriate permissions to move all folders in the front view backup into the truecrypt volume.
--Brad
For my offsite drives I would like to encrypt the contents so that if one of the drives is ever stolen, I can sleep well knowing that the data cannot be retrieved.
Ideally, I would like to use true crypt as the encryption software.
The only scheme I can think of is the following. I would like opinions on he feasibility of this scheme, suggestions on implementation or a better idea.
1) Format the USB drive as ext3
2) backup using front view to an unencrypted part of the external USB drive.
3) Remove the hard drive from the readynas duo and plug into my desktop PC (or my macbook pro). This step is needed since I will need full read write access to the ext3 volume.
4) Create a Truecrypt volume and mount it.
5) Create and account that has the same uuid and permissions as the administrator or root account on the readynas (here I will need some help!!)
6) Under this newly created account move the entire front view backup into the encrypted volume. (i.e. mv FullB /mount/xxxx)
Any opinions on this approach? Is there an easier approach? If not I could use some advice on step 5 to ensure the linux account has appropriate permissions to move all folders in the front view backup into the truecrypt volume.
--Brad
6 Replies
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- I would like to bump this as well. I have offsite 2TB backup drives that I take with me everywhere in muy backpack. However, if my backpack were to get stolen, I would have all my NAS data unencrypted and available to whoever wants to read it. Financial Data, Private Pictures, Copies of Essential Documents.
There ust be a way to be able to run a backup from the readynas to an encrypted drive or to encrypt the drive while backing up.
Maybe take front view out of the equation and implement a rsync + ??? option that could be scripted or aliased to keep it simple to use.
Thanks - I agree that encrypted backups would be a good feature.
Another potential approach is to connect an encrypted USB drive to a PC, and back up over the network to it. For most of the ReadyNAS platforms, this would actually improve backup speeds (assuming gigabit Ethernet). - You're talking about Rsync?
- It could be rsync, though an SMB backup job or a robocopy script on the PC would work also.
- The only issue with this is it requires a computer to be present as the middle man. Which causes issues. Where before, you could just plug it in via usb and crank your job, now my encrypted drive would need to be tethered to my computer and my machine would have to be present for the whole backup. PITA.
- I understand the drawback, which is why I supported the idea of native support for encrypted USB.
On the plus side, it will likely run faster if the encrypted USB drive is connected to a new PC - and it can be done on all ReadyNAS platforms today.
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