I have an external hard drive to which I want to backup some of my data. Although no one's likely to touch my primary computer, I wouldn't want someone messing with my data on the backup drive. So I want to password protect the important files there. Initially I was hoping ext4 would allow simply setting a password to a folder, but it's not as easy as that. I could make a password protected zip file... but the data I have is nearly 400GB, and creating / updating such an archive could take a day. Plus that I had cases of large archives becoming corrupted when updating individual files in them.
The only way is apparently to encrypt the folder or partition... but from what I read I couldn't come to any conclusion. There are many crypt tools, and all of them require a fancy setup I can't understand. I need something consistent, that I don't have to worry about having issues mounting / unmounting or the image becoming corrupt. I'm also undecided whether to make an encrypted partition or an encrypted mountable image... though I'd rather go for the second option. I do however need to be able to work with it in realtime (mount it and add / remove / update files and folders like on any drive). I also want my image to be protected by password, NOT a ssh key or any separate file I'd need to use to unlock it. Maybe something that works with the normal mount / umount commands like iso images?
So my question is: What is the most common tool used to encrypt data to an image? By common I mean an implementation that's available by default on any Linux distribution, that most people use and which is popular, that's most consistent and stable, and which is still under development or at least being maintained. Then what are the steps to create an encrypted image and mount / unmount it, which I can then work with freely? I'm looking for something as simple as possible, that works with simple and clear commands.
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