This HOWTO assumes you are already an Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 server administrator, and have a good level of understanding that goes along with that. If you don't know how to use "vi" or "nano", or you don't understand basics of XML files, this tutorial is not for you.

With so many companies experiencing data breaches due to external backup media, we take a bit of extra precautions with our data. Considering that we deal with electronic medical records, having our backups encrypted is a necessity.

Our workflow system creates backup DVD's of data, but restoring from those DVD's would take weeks at best due to the sheer volume of information we store. I've never been a fan of using magnetic media for backups, particularly hard drives, but in this case we have one copy of the data on DVD's and just need a media that allows for faster restores.

We decided to use external 1 TB USB hard drives from Western Digital. This left us with the challenge of encrypting the data, and making the backup drives easily swappable without needing root access.

Getting Ready

First, a few packages are needed. In our Ubuntu servers we had to install the following (your mileage may vary):

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot hal pmount ivman