On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 09:30:10PM +0100, Andrew Henry wrote: > I have a big disk that I cannot backup due to space constraints and want > to encrypt it. It is an ext3 external WD MyBook drive. I keep movies > music and backups on there so its nothing I cannot lose, but I would > hate to spend time ripping all my CDs and DVDs again.
you may have to, assuming you don't want to spend the money on another drive. > > I run Debian Etch on the laptop it is attached to and I mount the MyBook > manually, not relying on automounting. > > Is it as "simple" as running the following: > > cryptsetup create root /dev/sda1 -v -y -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 -h sha1 -s 128 > > dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/mapper/root bs=512 skip=0 seek=0. it would be that simple if you really wanted to wipe your disk... to my knowledge, you cannot "convert" a drive, you have to move everything off of it. One really kludgey solution, provided the sizes are appropriate, is to kill *part* of the drive leaving enough space to add a partition to store the data and then convert half the disk at a time. But then you'll end up with two encrypted partitions, which may not be what you want. > > Do I have all the tools I need in Etch? I installed Etch with encrypted LVM > partition option, so > I assume I have all I need? yup. It comes down to this. Backups -- if its something you don't want to have to go through the work to replace, then you should back it up. Even if it's something that can't be "lost" because you have original cds lying around, is the *effort* to re-rip it all something you don't want to "lose". my recommendation is: pick up another drive, slap it in a cheap IDE-USB box and copy that stuff. Then, when you're done with the change, you'll have a lovely backup you can stick in your safe... and you'll have a spare drive floating around for when one dies. A
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