Hello! I have a external drive I’ve encrypted with LUKs that has irreplaceable backups of mine, and for some reason no matter which PC I try it won’t unlock despite it being the correct password. It doesn’t give me anything else in the terminal other than what I put in the title.

I recently just backed up everything onto the external drive from my computer cause I was distro hopping. It’s worked fine on my PC, I saved the password so I was able to mount it no problem before, but now it won’t mount on any other PC I try. It isn’t the end of the world since I can just try and copy old data from my computers drive before the format since I haven’t downloaded anything yet that could overwrite anything important, but I’d still like to be able to get this external drive unlocked. As I’ve said, irreplaceable files of mine are on it so I’m hoping to get it working. Thank you!

  • Sophienomenal@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Hmm, what method did you use to back it up? It sounds to me like something got corrupted, though perhaps someone more experienced could identify a different issue. What I usually do to clone LUKS partitions is use a liveUSB (so no files change while backing up), then use cryptsetup to create a new LUKS partition on the backup drive if it’s a new drive (otherwise for incremental backups you can skip this step), then unlock both drives and rsync to the backup drive. This is also usually faster than pure cloning, as cloning would also copy the (encrypted) empty space in the partition, and for incremental backups, rsync will only copy the changed data so it’s much faster.

    This would also have the benefit of preventing corruption on transfer, because rsync uses checksums to verify the file was properly reconstructed in the new location, whereas something like dd won’t have the granularity to check per-file checksums (especially if used to clone a whole encrypted partition).