Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1188 mails)

[Anders Johansson <ajh@xxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 31 January 2012 11:44:58 Basil Chupin wrote:
> When I installed 12.1 I encrypted (for the first time) my HOME directory.
>
> Last night, in anticipation of installing KDE 4.8, I did a backup of my
> /home to an external HDD.
>
> Then the thought occurred to me - which is as a result of a court case
> in USA where the judge ruled that the Fifth Amendment did not apply
> where the woman refused to divulge the passphrase to her encrypted
> system and she had to type in the passphrase to make the contents of the
> HDD available to the DoJ - is my encrypted data now readable on the
> external HDD?
>
> The answer is YES. I attached the external to another computer and am
> able to read all the files in that backup.

You could back up the partition with dd to an image file, then it would stay 
encrypted. Or you could use a backup program that supports encrypting its 
output. But as long as the backup program reads files using the standard file 
system interface, they are going to get decrypted on the fly just like they 
are for any other program

Anders
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