Mad Marv’s Place

About six months ago I bought a 500 GB hard drive to store my ever growing podcast collection. At the time I wanted to see how full disk encryption would affect my system. I’ve been considering adding encryption to main file servers at work, when the time comes to upgrade/replace the hardware. Hopefully, that will be a year or more down the road, so the experimenting and testing has to be done now rather than later.

I chose to keep my C drive unencrypted and store only the OS and applications on it. All other data were stored on the new drive which was encrypted with Truecrypt. I chose to create a single Truecrypt file that took up essentially all of the space on the hard drive. A few months prior to this I had played with encrypting the entire partition on an external USB hard drive. Every time I plugged in that drive, Windows would think that the drive was unformatted and kept bugging me to format it. I figure it’s just a matter of time before I or someone else formats that drive accidentally. I keep a fair number of wiped hard drives around my desk, so it wouldn’t be too unusual to mistake an encrypted disk with a wiped disk. I figure this way, I could always identify an encrypted disk by the file name.

So I load up the drive and all goes well up to about two weeks ago. I’ve also been using removable disk trays to make swapping hard drives easier. I think the tray or the IDE ribbon decided to die on me and corrupt the hard drive for good measure. I tried everything I could think of to repair the drive without formatting it. Most of the data on the hard drive wasn’t critical, and my important data was safely backed up. So I gave up and formatted the hard drive. It works just fine now.

The whole experience made me think a bit more carefully about encryption. Although none of the problems were caused by encryption, it does limit troubleshooting options. I have a few data recovery software packages. None of them could really be put to use in this case because I couldn’t get the corrupted drive to mount correctly. Even if it did mount, I’m starting to think that they would not be useful anyway. Since the data would be fragmented all over the disk and encrypted, how could a data recovery tool figure out a way to reassemble the encrypted volume. Losing any part of that volume could and probably will mean losing the whole volume. So now I’m thinking of compartmentalizing the encrypted volumes somehow. Not sure how many or how large the volumes should be, but it’ll make a recovery somewhat more likely.

Marv

Tags: Technology //