How Likely Is VeraCrypt Not to Work & Is Corruption Something Very Common?
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For files to get corrupted do you have to do something specific, for them to get corrupted that easily, how likely is it to happen? What other things can happen to worsen the experince with VeraCrypt? And apart from backups, is there something specific that can be done to prevent all of that?
Side question: Is VeraCrypt completely secure, nobody can access a file or a drive unless they have the password? Theres never been a situation where it could actually malfunction and the drive or file was accessed without it's password?
In my experience, as a user on Windows, I can honestrly say that if the underlying file system is NTFS, and NTFS is used as the Veracrypt format, I haven't lost a single bit of data despite all the usual contingencies; power cuts, thoughtless removal of USB sticks, careless shutdowns etc.
But, USB thumbdrives should be be regarded as consumables, and WILL FAIL at some point, particualrly if they are read/written to constantly, are filled to more than (say) 66% capacity, and thus should be backed up/cloned regularly.
Given the particularly crucial nature of specific sectors of any encrypted sytem, if you don't backup the data they store on independent encrypted systems, you are asking for trouble!
In my situation, it is with external drives. If you say that external ones would probably fail at some point, is the best way to backup your information, through a cloud service? Because backing it to another external drive may result to that same problem again, right?
If it's to the cloud that youre backing up, it would be better to use Cryptomator right?
I don't back up to the 'cloud'. That's probably for historical reasons; I've been on the internet since 1997, lived in a rural location at that time, and even when ASDL 'broadband' was available to me it was only 2Mbps download speed ie at best only 0.5Mbps upload speed, making backup to the cloud impossibly slow. I now live in a town centre, have 40/10 Mbps download/upload, so I could use it, but it still would be slow compared to my local backup arrangements.
I also regard backing up to the cloud as inherently insecure! Why trust other people with your data? What if their server cluster goes down, or the service goes out of business. It has happened! People were persuaded to pay for 'cloud' services when there was money to be made from that, people came to think of the 'cloud' as a good thing, so that when money was to be made from flogging NAS devices, they were sold as 'local cloud devices'! Local storage every time for me; it's faster and more secure!
I'm obviously rather 'old school'; I regard HDDs as inherently more reliable than SSDs. The early versions of the latter had high failure rates; they are better now. Early HDDs also could fail, but once accelerometer technology was introduced into them, failure form mechanical shock was rare.
My earlier comments about USB thumbdrives also applies to memory cards, the key point being how they are used. If they are 'hammered, they will wear out.
Backups should be backed up. My main daily commuting activities are conducted from a 12GB Veracrypt file container stored on a 32GB USB thumbdrive, with about 3.5GB of additional non-encryted files. (I run portable software from the 12GB VC file when mounted; browser, email client, office suite, etc etc, storing preferences and data on it.) The 12GB file (when unmounted) is backed up almost daily to a 2TB HDD NAS device; the whole thumbdrive is cloned fairly regularly to three other identical thumbdrives.
I run a server on my main PC, and am a keen amateur photographer; the server files are backed up daily to an encrypted file on the same NAS, as are latest photos once processed. My entire C: drive is 'imaged' weekly (using Reflect) to an encrypted file on the NAS.
The NAS is backed up daily to a second identical NAS, and approx three-weekly to a portable 2TB HDD, stored offsite. The usage of the two NAS devices is completely different; one 'suffers' the stress of being constantly powered up and continually read/written to; the other the 'thermal shock' of being switched on/off once a day, and one big write operation. The likelihood that they will both catastrophically fail at the same time is vanishingly small. However, there is an argument for ensuring your backup drives are bought from different manufactures, at different times, to make sure they don't possibly have some identical design/manufacuring flaw. But pattern of usage is probably the key issue.
I don't contibute much to the forum currently, because I'm interested in helping out with problems with VC, and to some extent, with its integrate into Windows. But it seems to me that so many of the problems that users experience with 'Veracrypt' these days are nothing to do with VC, but with misunderstandings with how computers work, or how the OS works, or hardware issues. Portable drive didn't mount? Did you try a different cable? Did it work then? Then chuck the first cable out, and buy a new one! Mounting a VC file from a thumbdrive a bit hit-and-miss? Buy a new thumbdrive, get the data transferred, and chuck the old one out. Cables, memory sticks/cards are cheap; recovering data is at best time consuming, possibly expensive and likely impossible.
I learnt early on the importance of backup when my I lost everything because my first (Win95) PC failed. I've 'lost' data since, but have always being able to recover it; I've never 'lost' data because of VC, only because of hardware or other software (including the OS) failing.
Data security isn't just about protecting it from others; it's about being able to access it yourself, when you want to. Veracrypt without (encrypted) backup is a disaster waiting to happen, sadly a lesson too many peole here learn the hard way.
I agree with Adrian Kentleton ! People who know almost nothing about computers are the ones who complain about VeraCrypt. These people make no backups, etc.
They are in a hurry to encrypt / hide files but don't want to take the time to understand how VeraCrypt works.
They have limited understanding how to use an external drive, what an OS does. etc etc. That's why they end up formatting the wrong drive, writing over files and on and on! They don't want to take the time to create a backup. They don't understand pros and cons of a full disk encryption. They don't understand the importance keeping track of the passwords.
Adrian Kentleton is on the internet since 1997, which may sound scary to many. I dont remember when I started on the internet, but I remember my RAM was 2mb and the HDD - 20MB :)
With that being said, its in my genome now that i can't backup to the cloud. I just can't.