Yeah, I don't think it's a good idea, but if you really HAVE to do it, that's a way.

For the case of an external hard drive, where you don't want to have to reformat it nor buy a second drive, it'd be a valid way of doing things that I'd trust. But who keeps all their data on just one drive?
Just reformat the backup drive to be encrypted.. back everything up to it.. test the backup.. then reformat the main drive and restore to it from the now-encrypted backup.


On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 at 16:53 Noah O'Donoghue <noah.odonoghue@gmail.com> wrote:
Hmm... Seems like it might be my only option but it's really precarious.

What about:

1. In use files
2. Indexers, backup software, media servers, that will see each file change and will try and back it up
3. File modification dates.... Metadata...

etc etc.

On 23 April 2015 at 14:59, Toby Corkindale <toby@dryft.net> wrote:
Hi Noah,
You might be able to achieve this with ecryptfs, from Ubuntu.
It can mount an encrypted drive with unencrypted-passthrough; you can then run around rewriting all the files to convert them.
ie.
mount -t ecryptfs encrypted crypted
find -type f crypted -exec rewrite_file \{\} \;
where rewrite_file does something like
cp $FILE tmp_file
rm $FILE
mv tmp_file $FILE


-Toby


On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 at 08:36 Noah O'Donoghue <noah.odonoghue@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey all,

I have a few cases where I'd like to encrypt without taking the system down for extended periods, ie, servers.

In the windows/apple world truecrypt / bitlocker / filevault will all let you encrypt the root partition as a background process, throttled to a low IO load. Usually this requires a reboot to get started, then runs in the background.

Does anyone know how to achieve this in the Linux world? (preferably with luks)

-Noah
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