crypted drive backup with dd not working properly
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Hi!
I'm pretty new to using VeraCrypt.
I have been trying to get over a problem.
I installed veracrypt on a windows 11 laptop and encrypted the whole drive with veracrypt.
Then i rebooted with a live linux usb and made dd backup of the entire device.
It worked at the beginning. But about a week after veracrypt install and using, i tried a backup again and it does not work anymore. Backup is completed but the resulting file is 60% of the disk size. I know that encrypted drive backup should be about the same size as the drive itself (512 GB in my case). I used pv command with the backup and i can see that when real data is backed up i reach a certain copy speed. but when reacheing over this 60% backup speed goes way up and no more data is added to the backup. dd reads all the disk, but kinda makes backup of empty drive from that point. when restoring cleanly from that backup, machine does not boot at all, which is kinda logical cause that backup seems broken. Those initial older backups work and i am able to boot from those old backups.
Has anybode seen this kind of behaviour. I have only used veracrypt with one type of hardware. So maybe its a hardware specific problem or maybe veracrypt did not do kinda proper shutdown? Maybe there is away to check veracrypt status on a drive from linux veracrypt binary?
Any help is appreciated. Have been googling it for days now. No help yet. Maybe just a bad googler and someone can point me to nice solution article or forum link.
Any help is good.
Hi again!
After days of testing, i got to the bottom of this.
I am awlays using dd with gzip - all the time. When You pipe Vera encrypted dump through gzip, it will get broken. I don't know why. But when i leave it out, backup is made correctly. Not a problem, because VeraCrypt backup won't get any smaller with gzip anyway.