A related topic to encrypted disk drives. Anybody who has a desire to see their data around long term makes backups of their drives. At least one of these backups is usually physically near the drive in question.

What good it is to have an encrypted disk if the backups are not also encrypted?

Backups occur at the file system level, where an encrypted file system does not appear encrypted, so that work here does not directly leverage to encrypted backups.

This problem is most easily solved by copying the entire partion/file that is encrypted as blocks. These blocks are size according to the destination media. If you use floppies you break the encrypted fs/file into (e.g.) 1.44 meg chunks, if you use tape you can throw the whole block at the media, similarly with another hardisk. The unix/linux/386bsd 'dd' program is especially useful for this purpose and I assume there are similar utils for dos. For replacement you simply dump the whole lot back as one encrypted file system. This method should be faster than grabbing individual files and backing them up as the program just has to seek to a specified place and start reading a defined amount of [encrypted] data. Mark mark@coombs.anu.edu.au