I am interested in converting my many Slackware linux boxes to using a product like truecrypt.


I manage the many partitions using Clonezilla, and am wondering if anyone has any pointers on the use of Clonezilla to backup, restore and move encrypted partitions?

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure that you will be particularly satisfied with software encryption. Certainly not with respect to backups, which have no choice except to either back-up the entire encrypted file (which it cannot read), or to back-up copies of data from the encrypted volume (which it can read) ... meaning that Eve merely needs to steal the backups, instead.

You can buy disk drives that have hardware encryption support built-in. The drives are "useless if stolen."

My linux systems use LUKS on the partitions and files are backed up in the clear to a secondary encrypted device as well as encrypted and backed up to an unencrypted device. The encryption overhead on a reasonably modern system is minimal and generally unnoticeable.

Backups become an issue as stated above where you have to decide whether to backup the data in the clear to an encrypted device or encrypted to any device. The choice will largely be influenced by the type of data being stored, how much data needs to be stored, how the backups will be physically stored (and where) and why it is being encrypted.

Unfortunately, there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to backups, storage and encryption.