Truecrypt on network

I've been using Truecrypt containers for quite some time and love it. I've never tried to encrypt a full partition or drive though.
I have a few external drives that I want to encrypt, but wanted to try and encrypt the whole drive, instead of using a container. I know when I use a container, it mounts a virtual drive. Does it do the same if you have a full drive encrypted?
Basically, I'd like to encrypt the full drive, but keep it assigned a drive letter, say Z:, because I have that drive mapped to other computers on my LAN. Will this work if I encrypt the full drive? or will I have to mount a virtual drive? I think I could use a container and mount it to the same drive letter each time, but if I do this with multiple containers, I'd have to make sure the same container is mounted to the same drive letter each time so when I access from another computer the drive letter will have the content I need.

Am I making sense?

If so, can anyone provide a good approach for encrypting external drives that are shared on a network?
Thanks!

 

Hello,

I have done it.

Since we're talking Windows, here's what I did:

Encrypted the entire volume; in Windows, if you click on the volume letter, Windows tells you it is unformatted.

The drive is always connected and gets a generic letter, let's say L:

Now, in TrueCrypt, I select to automount drives on startup, and allow TrueCrypt to run on startup. So it takes this volume L: and mounts it to let's say W:.

Then, I share this drive to other machines. The only thing is, Windows forgets the shares after reboot, because the drive is unmounted, but a script solves this. Or manually, reenable share every time.

So you have 2 letters: a drive that is supposedly unformatted, and a volume container, assigned to a different letter and used by machines on the network.

Works great, both for Windows and Linux machines. Since I reboot once in a month or so, no problem with shares, plus restoring them is a piece of cake, only about 3 minutes for 500GB of data.

I won't go into Linux details, things are even simpler there.

Mrk

P.S. If you use firewire instead of usb and have a fw-enabled switch, then you can have your drive on all the time, without having to reenable the share on every reboot.

 

Mrkvonic, thanks for the reply. I posted this then got tied up with other projects and forgot all about the thread!

The very problem I anticipated is what you mentioned: that upon system restart, I'll always have to remount the drives. You mentioned writing a script. Any clues how I would do that?

 

Hello,
Do you know any basic, DOS like style?
Cheers,
Mrk