Veracrypt - Two questions and one problem....

[Mike Heden]

Hello

I'm in the process of changing my OS from MacOS to Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon, part of which is to provide encryption for documents that need that extra security.

I have a few questions about Veracrypt that I've been unable to answer by looking at the package documentation or general Googling.

I currently use a MacOS encrypted.sparseimage as a container for encrypted documents. From what I've read, this is similar to Veracrypt's file container. The MacOS encrypted.sparseimage is just another file that can be moved, copied, etc, and can be opened to reveal its content by supplying the decryption password.

When a sparseimage is setup, as far as I can remember, it's necessary to specify a maximum size for the container. However, the container size is not fixed at that maximum; instead the encrypted.sparseimage file size is only as large as is necessary to hold the encrypted content.

In order to provide an "off site" backup for my most important documents, I sync my encrypted.sparseimage file to Dropbox. The fact that the file is only as large as it needs to be for the contained documents is useful when syncing to Dropbox in terms of faster syncing times and a reduced Dropbox space requirement.

Does a Veracrypt file container work in the same way, or is the Veracrypt container of a fixed size irrespective of its content?

What about a container based on a device - in my case a 10GB partition? If I sync to Dropbox using a partition-based container will I end-up syncing 10GB irrespective of the total size of the files in the container?

In Veracrypt I've specified that my encrypted partition is to be mounted on
/home/mike/Encrypted. However, once the volume is mounted, the Encrypted folder is owned by root and I have no access to it. As soon as I dismount my Veracrypt volume, permissions on Encrypted revert to being owned by mike.

I found a couple of posts where it was suggested that using chown after mounting would get round the problem, but I'd really prefer to drive Veracrypt totally via the GUI rather than the command line.

Veracrypt is version 1.24-update-4 which I think is the latest stable release. I've tried completely removing it with sudo apt-get --purge remove Veracrypt and then reinstalling from Synaptic and starting again, but its made no difference - I'm still locked out by root ownership being imposed on the Encrypted directory.

Can anyone suggest what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,

Mike

[John Deener]

Veracrypt container of a fixed size irrespective of its content?

Yes