I have an external hard drive that contains several folders. The largest of these folders is a backup that I often update by rsyncing the relevant folders from an encrypted (via Ubuntu's implementation of ecryptfs) internal drive and the remainder are folders that I don't have copies of anywhere else and likely do not have enough storage space to place elsewhere. What I want to do is encrypt my external drive whilst still being able to update its contents via rsync, however I seem to have ran in to the following problems:
- For the reasons already discussed, any method of encryption that would require me to wipe the external drive is highly undesirable. I would be willing to buy another drive, but that would cause issues mentioned in point #3.
- A method based on a system like ecryptfs would be undesirable because, to the best of my knowledge, the backup would be made inaccessible if the internal drive's user account becomes unusable (e.g. if the internal drive dies, which is half of the reason why I'd want to have the backup in the first place!).
- Even if I could get one of these methods to work, I do not believe that they would be compatible with rsync. I often don't have the opportunity to leave my machine turned on for long enough to copy my files from the internal drive to the external drive without the help of rsync. So unless I can get rsync to work with the encryption method, I would almost rather have an unencrypted drive that I could rsync.
