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Ok, this is a tough one, and it might not even be possible, but no harm in asking I guess.

I have a Buffalo Terastation file server that I use for network attached storage. After a couple of phone calls to customer services I realised that there is no way to backup to disk encrypted. In effect, I would be carrying unencrypted company data off-site daily, which is obviously unacceptable.

I had a go at TrueCrypt, EncFS, and a few others, and as far as I could see all of them required that you install some software on the machine that is to use the file system, which makes sense. Unfortunately the firmware on the Terastation is closed and I cannot install any software (and I can't build from source either, since Buffalo didn't include a compiler).

Are there any ways to copy files to disk, where as soon as they are written to the disk they are transparently encrypted, without having to install additional software?

I'm not sure it matters too much, but the Terastation firmware is Linux based, although as I mentioned, closed.

Many thanks,

Andreas

Robotnik
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andreas
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3 Answers3

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You don't need to install TrueCrypt on the Terastation. Install it on your main disk. You can then put an encrypted file system on the Terastation. If, for some reason, you cannot put an encrypted file system on the Terastation, you can still create a TrueCrypt encrypted file on your local disk (where TrueCrypt uses that file as a virtual encrypted file system), backup to that virtual encrypted file system and then copy the TrueCrypt encrypted file to your Terastation.

Marnix A. van Ammers
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Apparently it is possible, but not easy of course.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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I use PGP Desktop's PGP NetShare for this kind of purpose. The encryption is done by the client so it doesn't matter what you are storing the files on, you could even use a USB ThumbDrive. The files are stored encrypted, but the encryption / decryption is transparent to the user. They put in their password when the share or drive is mounted, and after that they access it like any other drive. Nothing has to be installed on the file server, all of the work is done by the client. The only drawback is that each client needs to have PGP Netshare installed, and there is a licensing cost per client.