I’ve been using veracrypt for the past 4 years to create container files in everything from thumb drives to external hard drives. After upgrading one of my backup drives, I decided that I will switch to a different filesystem altogether going on, from ntfs to ext4, since I havent really used windows in those 4 years. With the reasoning behind using veracrypt and ntfs in the first place being for compatibility, should I switch to LUKS? Veracrypt is dramatically more feature rich but I dont really take advantage of those. I just encrypt my drives in case of burglars and other unwanted eyes. I do already have a disaster plan in place so I would have to do a total overhaul of things, but I’m not sure if this is a wise decision. My gut says no but what do you think? What would I gain?

Edit: shouldve added that these drives are for warm storage for my weekly manual backups of files.

Edit 2: the general opinion is to use a tool that supports encryption but I dont really feel comfortable with that but do appreciate it. It’s just I’ve been manually updating my backup drives for a while now and like how simple my routine is. Think my decision is to just stick with veracrypt but format every future drive (including a new one I ordered) as ext4. My current drives wont be reformatted in order to reduce unnecessary wear on them. Thank you all for your help

  • fmstratEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    LUKS is a great option, but as someone who was in your exact shoes, and went from TrueCrypt to VeraCrypt to LUKS, I eventually landed on ZFS.

    It’s just so, easy. Make an encrypted Zpool on your main /storage disk. Assign a /storage/documents (or whatever you want), Make another Zpool on your /backup disk, and use zfs snap and send to copy only the bit level data that changes.

    So fast, so little disk access, and you can manage snapshots. There is even copy-on-write meaning file recovery is easy, too. I use it to send over SSH to a remote server, too.