right click and generate truecrypt volume from contents

Question

has any one found a way to take the contents of a folder and programiticly generate a volume for it in truecrypt that is just the right size?

like in windows how you right click and select send to archive etc... I am hoping theres a solution for linux to either gather the relevent data or script a command line to generate the volume and copy or move contents to that volume.

Answer 1

Does it have to be a truecrypt container, or a container at all?

• If you'd like gpg (pgp), then

  tar -z -cv datadir | gpg --output data.tar.gz.gpg -c

  creates a passphrase (as opposed to -e public/secret key) encrypted compressed tar file, about the same size or maybe smaller than the source folder.

• eCryptFS or EncFS would do on-the-fly encryption of a new folder, that's about the same size as the original.

  • Does not use a container file or partition, keeps encrypted files on the same drive in a new folder. Therefore only uses as much disk space as is required (after encryption some files are a little larger, tiny files may have a minimum size) and increases in size dynamically (ex. space is only limited by the host filesystem).

• TrueCrypt still exists for Linux, not officially supported anymore but it's not "broken" or anything AFAIK (as of the start of 2016). But cryptsetup below supports the truecrypt format & existing volumes too...

• dm-crypt / cryptsetup / LUKS uses container files that look like a separate partition/drive, very similar to truecrypt.

• A custom script (bash for instance) you create with a combination of du -bs <folder> | cut -f1 to find the required size and creating a file of the size plus the dm-crypt/LUKS & filesystem overhead space (varies by encryption type, # of keys, filesystem type & options) could work too, and dm-crypt/cryptsetup supports truecrypt volumes too.