[colug-432] truecrypt

[Fred Gablick]

I've run Truecrypt for years and years, on Mac, Linux, and Windows, and have had absolutely zero problems with it.  As others mentioned before, the only problems were related to the disk itself, or having to do a fsck once in a while.

I DO encrypt my entire offsite disks with Truecrypt, and have only had to fsck them from time to time.  I've never lost data, though I do seem to remember once having to recreate the entire volume.  I obviously lost the data on that volume, but since it was a backup disk, it was simply copied back on anyway.  Rsync is my method of choice for backups, and it's never given me any problems going to / from encrypted volumes.

The propaganda says that the encrypted data is indistinguishable from background noise.  I'm not much of a hacker so I can't prove that, but I do see that the disks are recognized as completely blank when I hook them up; no volumes or partitions are recognized.

Even on my computers that have fully-encrypted disks or volumes, I still have a 2 or 3GB hidden Truecrypt file where I keep the sensitive personal information, such as financial info, drivers license and passport scans, etc.  I'm a paranoid fellow, and set my computers (laptops especially) as if I'm going to hand it to a thief.  

I'm not sure any of this actually answers your questions, but I wanted to relay some real-world experiences with it, and say that you really can't go wrong with it.

Good luck.

- Fred


On Feb 7, 2014, at 8:22 AM, Keith Larson wrote:

> I have had my laptop encrypted (full disk) with truecrypt for years and have had no issues whatsoever with it.  I work mostly with Novell products, so I have their iFolder installed to sync all of my files/folders to my server at home.  This is automatic and transparent.  Think of on-prem DropBox.  I used to have this server co-located, so that also addressed my off-site backups, but that changed recently.  I have a vm setup off-site that I rsync the data off to nightly.  I'm fortunate that I have a place to do this for free, but I was using a vm running on AWS for a while to handle this.  It worked very well and was only running me about $30/mo.  You can have as much storage as you like, but read the details on the pricing.  It is difficult to estimate up front.  I started small to get an idea of the cost and then added more data later when I saw that it wasn't too bad.
> 
> Keith Larson
> Franklin Computer Services - K12group
> klarson at k12group.net
> (614) 561-4887 (mobile)
>  
> 
> 
> >>> Rick Hornsby <richardjhornsby at gmail.com> 2/6/2014 10:17 PM >>>
> 
> Any one have experience with truecrypt?  No real problem with it, just a little anxious to delete original files that I have put in a truecrypt volume, like my taxes for the last several years.  I’m afraid I’m going to do something dumb like accidentally delete the one (10GB thick-provisioned) file that has everything in it, or that somehow truecrypt will stop working.
> 
> The other thing I’m wondering the best way to deal with is to off-site backup the volume.  You can’t diff the volume, since it is a binary file.  Repeatedly copying a 10GB file will start to annoy the place you’re uploading it to.  Would it make more sense to create a local and remote truecrypt volume and do something with rsync to keep the contents in sync as long as both volumes are open?  Hmm, I’m wondering if a hosting provider like DH would even allow that sort of thing (assuming it was possible now that I think about it?)
> 
> Basically it boils down to looking for suggestions/experience/advice to both secure sensitive files in case of theft and have them similarly secured when they live in a remote location.  i.e., I’m not going to put my tax documents on my Google drive unless they’re inside a container that Google or anyone else cannot read.  Even then I’m not super comfortable with that.
> 
> thanks!
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