3 Ways To Automate The Backup Of TrueCrypt Containers
For some, 2013 has been the “year of encryption”. Leading the rise of all things security. Among the best of these, the tool TrueCrypt, allows you to create entire encrypted drives and “containers”, that may include one or more drive volumes. While the validity of TrueCrypt is currently being tested, many are flocking to TrueCrypt in an effort to keep their important files secure. With that, comes the challenge of keeping these secure files and containers backed up regularly. This isn’t exactly easy when the TrueCrypt file may actually be in use. I’ve compiled a list of things you can do to keep these files backed up.
As you probably know, I’m a fan of TrueCrypt. The power you have to personally encrypt data is only belied by its failure to make the backup process easy. Given that you want to backup the TrueCrypt container, and not the files within; The backup process has to be responsive to this. Here are three ways you might use to backup this data.
1. Command-Line options with a batch file
You might make a simple process that dismounts the Truecrypt volume using the “/dismount” switch, and then does an xcopy of the file to an external source. Once finished, use the “/v myvolume.tc” switch to remount the volume. More details on Truecrypt’s command line options can be found online.
2. Shadow Copy aware tool
Automatically backing up the TrueCrypt volume can be tricky, especially if the file is open. Using a shadow copy aware tool such as HoboCopy can get you access to the file, and you just want to copy it out to an external drive source or other storage location.
3. Cloud synchronization tool
Not ideal for the privacy of information, but very useful because of the incredibly powerful synchronization tool – Dropbox. Place the TrueCrypt volume in a Dropbox folder with enough space and let it fully transfer to Dropbox. In TrueCrypt, make sure the setting “Preserve modification timestamp of file containers” is off [1]. Now, every time you dismount this particular TrueCrypt volume, Dropbox will only synchronize the change made and you’ll have another copy of this TrueCrypt volume everywhere you have Dropbox installed. Other synchronization tools that track bit-level changes may be useful too.
There are certainly other ways to go about this, but the best option would likely be TrueCrypt itself. Until that presents itself, we’ll have to find other options. If you’ve come across a good way to automate the backup of TrueCrypt files, let me know in the comments.