On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 11:18:16AM +0000, Marcus Williams wrote: > Hi - > > I've been investigating doing encrypted backups to tape using afio and > gpg. Unfortunately this method proved to be extremely slow compared to > the standard backup (which was expected). Someone on the > debian-security list suggested looking at using a loop device such as > loop-aes that is connected to /dev/nst0 as this might be faster. > > The only problem I can foresee with this is if there are media errors > on the tape. How does the loop device cope with this? afio manages to > deal with this sort of thing by spooling forward until the corrupt > data is passed over and a correct magic id can be found, but > presumably if the tape is encrypted a media error will lose the rest > of the tape... is this true? AFAI understand CBC you loose the corrupted blocks + the one following it, after that you should be OK. (With CFB you loose everything after the corruption and CTB(?) shouldn't even loose the block following the corruption.) But i'm only an amateuer in crypto-things, so i may be wrong. Bis denn -- Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. - Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
