Pedro Duarte - 2021-02-07

Hello,

I started recently using Verycrypt to encrypt a hard drive dedicated to backups of personal items.

I was faced with the choice of either using an encrypted file container or a volume within a partition or drive... So far I have chosen the first as I read it favor portability (I plan to access it under Linux and Windows).

I was wondering how veracypt solution is resilient on data corruption as of a hard-drive bad sector event.

To make my question clear, let's considering the following scenarios:

Not using Verycypt, just a plain NTFS unencrypted formatted drive: Let's say I copy over 10000 files. Some bad sectors happen years later and only 50 files were affected. Not bad. But nothing is encrypted. As long I have another drive with the same files, I get 0% of data loss.
    Using Veracypt, same NTFS unencrypted formatted drive but all my 10000 files are inside of a 'encrypted file container', a huge single file that extends over the whole drive. Then, the dreaful bad sector starts to happen.
    Same as 2, but using instead a volume inside a partition.

If using 2, assuming I can recover the file container with with the OS drive repair tool or some other 3rd party software so that only a fraction of the Veracrypt container file is corrupted... How does Veracrypt handle that? If some data is corrupted on a file container, would that affect only some of the files inside it or would invalidate all the files? (assuming the bad sectors doesnt happen on any kind of 'file allocation table' specific of Veracrypt - and I hope the OS allows to still retrieve the container file although with some percentage of corruption)

Would it 3 be a better choice to at least recover some files?

Regards

 
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