Here is the situation:

I am using Tonido Backup to backup a friend’s computer (his computer is being backed up to an external hard drive that is connected to my plug). I am looking for a way to encrypted the external drive so that if someone were to swipe it, they wouldn’t be able to access of the personal data stored on the drive.

I’ve looked at TrueCrypt, but I’m not sure how to go about installing this on Tonido (although I am currently booting from USB). My understanding is that I would need to have TrueCrypt installed so that I could mount the encrypted drive on Tonido. Does anyone have a suggestion on this or a different way to encrypt the backup data?

P.S. This might be a cool feature to add to Tonido Backup for the future (i.e. a way for Tonido Backup to encrypt the backups that it stores on disk).

Well, I've tried so many different ways to accomplish this and it looks like I've finally found something that works. I'll post it here just in case it is helpful to anyone else.

Basically I wanted a way to encrypted files and folders so that if anyone ever walked away with one of my drives, they would have a bunch of useless encrypted data (and therefore no access to personal data). I also wanted a way to mount the encrypted directories so that they appeared to Tonido Backup as regular directories and therefore could make use of the incremental backups where it only backs up changes since the last backup (as opposed to another method whereby I could encrypt a tar file before backing up and then backup that tar and push through everything as big encrypted container each time..... which obviously results in backups that take much longer).

The Solution:
First off I want to reiterate again that I am booting from a USB drive. The solution that I finally found is encFS. http://www.arg0.net/encfs I don't know if it is the best encryption method but I think it's good enough for my purposes here.

Basically (using the method in the link below) I determined that fuse was already installed on the plug. Next I simply installed encfs and followed the directions to setup the helper script. Now with a couple of simple commands I am able to mount and unmount encrypted directories (for example on a mount point of /media/enc0) and I can continue to use Tonido Backup to backup personal documents to my USB drives without having to worry about them sitting around in an unencrypted format.

http://xlife.zuavra.net/index.php/66/

Very Cool. Thanks for sharing!

Well, I have some bad news. It appears that this strategy doesn't work so well after all. While it does everything that I would want 'in theory', something bad happens when trying to perform remote backups to an encrypted directory. For some reason the encrypted directory gets unmounted (and in fact can't even be seen unless using the LS command) during backups of more than a few files. This makes it almost impossible to complete a full backup. I'd love to hear from anyone who knows more about this than I do.... Or if anyone has found an easier way to make sure their backups are encrypted (on disk).

Has anyone figured out a solution? I am in the same boat.

I've searched around to find a Truecrypt solution; however, there is no binary compiled for Armel that I could find. Mind you I am very new to Tonido and Armel systems and also tried compiling from source... but couldn't make it work!

I would also suggest that this would be a great - and I think easy (for developers) to implement - as part of the Tonido suite.

Suggestions welcome.

John - still excited about the new world of headless plugs

I would like to also support the need for encryption in Tonido backup. It seems important to me that I can encrypt my backups made by Tonido's backup software. E.g. if you are backing up to a friend's computer, you might not want this friend to be able to access your files.

There has been some work done to create a TrueCrypt package that runs on Tonidoplug (credit to Thomas).
Details here
http://bores.fr/blog/2011/03/creer-son-propre-cloud-partie-5-installer-truecrypt-pour-le-sheevaplugtonidoplug/

For the lazy, summary here


Before it runs I am pretty sure you need to make the Fuse libraries available so


To save having to run this command after a restart, add the following lines to the
/etc/modules file.

I have installed and run it, but am not convinced it does what I want, so no extensive testing done.

Hi, I had some success with this - see this post: viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4963

Hope it helps someone else too.