Directory Encryption

NachT

NachT

NachT

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Joined
20 May 2006
Posts
1,068
Hey all,

I'll start off by warning you I've been an avid Windows user for the past forever, and have just recently started using Linux (Ubuntu 18 to be exact).

What i'm looking for is a good recommendation for a package/app used to encrypt entire directories on Linux, the app name will be enough, I can research how to utilise the rest.

Some key points to be aware of:

- I'll be using the suggested package to encrypt all of my consolidated backups off-site. This is currently around 800GB of data, and can include any file type.

- The location of the data will be sitting on a two drive RAID1 array

- The data will be accessed and written to via a samba share

On Windows, I use TrueCrypt which has been amazing, so I'm looking for something similar to this for Linux.

My main concern is, if whatever package is suggested creates an encrypted 'container', this container will have to be decrypted and mounted, during this stage would the utilised space double on the drive? As it would have to be re-encrypted, then that 1 whole 800GB file would have to re-sync to the other RAID1 drive. Also, if the usage space double during decryption, I wouldn't have the drive space for this to happen.

Also, CLI only as this is on a Ubuntu Server. No GUI suggestions please :)
Thanks!
 
Most distros will offer to encrypt your home directory at the point of install.

Also KDE Plasma (used by KDE Neon, Kubuntu, OpenSUSE and other KDE Plasma based distros) offers something called a 'vault' which will encrypt certain folders if you want it to.
 
TrueCrypt is now VeraCrypt and is available in the Ubuntu software app, looks and works the same as TrueCrypt on Windows but can't do encrypted boot drive, it can also work directly with TrueCrypt encrypted files.
 
Use ecryptfs and let it do the rest? http://ecryptfs.org/

I have my nextcloud data directory hosted in ecryptfs, and I then use CrashPlan to replicate the encrypted data copy up to Crashplans servers (where they are again encrypted with a second private key).
 
Thanks for all the feedback guys,

I tried ecryptfs, which actually does seem pretty amazing. But in my case it wasn't working correctly. I was using an ecryptfs'ed Directory within a samba share, then trying to upload files from Windows systems, which worked fine, unless the files were over around 4GB whih seemed to crash out.

I've opted for the VeraCrypt container solution, which is working perfectly :D Getting great read/write speeds from it from both Linux and Windows systems. Only downside is I might need to increase the container size later down the line, but that's no big deal I suppose :)
 
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