Creating a LUKS-encrypted DVD/BD data disc

I’ve been backing up some of my larger files to Bluray lately, instead of trying to upload them over a 10 Mbps uplink.

In the past, I used GPG (on a .tar or compressed .tar.xz) or Veracrypt (on a file container) to encrypt at rest, before burning those files onto a standard UDF/ISO9660 optical disc. Now that I use a Linux desktop, I wanted something slightly more native — a method that

  1. protects the directory structure and filenames without needing to use an archive file (like .tar);
  2. would be generally unintelligible on a Windows PC (this is a feature, not a bug); and
  3. could be scripted on the command line for server backups, without requiring a GUI.

Based on some resources online, I settled on using LUKS.

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Incoming college freshmen: Campus Backup Service is a ripoff

Campus Backup Service marketing letter

If you’re a freshman at Penn or many of the other universities that are raking in revenue from freshmen beyond tuition and fees, you may have received e-mails and letters offering all sorts of wonderful things. The one that caught my attention was something called “Campus Backup Service”.

It’s a cleverly marketed service that tries to leverage the anxiety of freshmen and parents to sell you something you don’t need — or rather, something you need, but not from this company.

Campus Backup Service marketing letter
They use the same scare tactics to market the service that are used by scammers. Don’t fall for it. Scan courtesy of Hannah C.

There’s a disaster scenario — a student without backup suffers a virus infection on her laptop and… “her sleep, her composure, and her GPA all suffered… it was horrible”. There’s an alternate scenario — someone uses this company’s service, and avoids the disaster.

Yes, college students need a convenient and viable form of backup, just as all computer users do, but not from this company. This is almost a scam (but not quite). (Notice how they target “parents of incoming students”, who might be less tech-savvy than college students?)

Vinay Dinesh and I are both Information Technology Advisor Managers (ITA Managers, for short) at the University of Pennsylvania, and we are writing, as individuals, to help you find the right backup solution, whether it’s as simple as copying files to an external hard drive, or syncing files to the cloud. But Campus Backup Service isn’t right. (See our upcoming collaborative post to see how you can back up your files the right way.)

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