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Should I rethink the encryption method of my backup drives? (lemmy.today)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The only change I would recommend looking at is using a backup tool like restic, which can encrypt and also provide snapshots. Restic (and ilk, I'm sure) also deduplicate incremental backups, can compress, and (restic, at least) can mount snapshots. That last feature has been so helpful to me, because it allows easy access to individual files in a snapshot.

Restic also supports a number of cloud storage backends, like BackBlaze, which makes offsite storage hella easier than carting physical media around.

There are a couple of these sorts of tools, and while I'm most familiar with restic, I'd guess they have similar capability. I'd suspect using one would simplify your set-up.