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saintalfonzo's avatar
Apr 26, 2020

How to decrypt an external drive

Hello,

 

My ReadyNAS has been successfully backing up my entire network for some weeks now. I am really happy with it. However I am now testing some procedures to backup the backup so to speak. I want to backup from the ReadyNAS to a USB volume for an offsite backup. When I format a drive to ext4 and run a backup task with the USB drive as a desitnation, it completes with no problem. I can connect the drive to a Linux VM and access my files to successfully verify them.

 

However I want the drive to by encrypted. When I attach the same drive and format to ext4 with encryption, I can run the same backup task. It completes successfully and I can browse the files on the USB dive via the browser on the ReadyNAS. When I connect the drive to my Linux VM I see that the partition is encrypted with LUKS, which is great. My data is protected.

 

What I can not figure out is how I can use the key file, which I downloaded from my ReadyNAS to decrypt/unlock the partition on my Linux VM. Fair warning, I am no Linux expert, but I have tried googling and it seems that I always need to supply a passphrase. However there is no passphrase supplied when I format the drive via the ReadyNAS. It seems to just generate the key file and just use that.

 

What am I missing? Any suggestions would be apprecaited.

 

Thanks!

1 Reply

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  • For example, if I try to decrypt by opening the volume

     

    sudo crypt setup open /dev/<device> --key-file <keyfileFromReadyNAS>.key NAS-Backup

    I get the error 

     

    No key available with this passphrase.

    Running cryptsetup luksDump on the device, I see that key slot 0 is enabled. Is there a way around the passphrase using only the key file as downloaded from the ReadyNAS?

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