Using TrueCrypt with rsync.net.

For various reasons of convenience I wanted to store a bunch of files in a TrueCrypt volume, which was around 5GByte in size. I am on an ADSL Broadband connection which has a download speed of about 6 MBits/sec, but an upload speed of only around 700 KBits/sec. Creating the TrueCrypt volume locally and then uploading it wasn’t really an option. The upload would probably take a couple of days and would doubtless be interrupted and not want to resume correctly.

The next idea was to mount the rsync.net space using sshfs and then create the TrueCrypt volume on the rsync.net mounted volume. This works in principle, but creating the TrueCrypt container was about as fast as trying to upload a ready made one. Finally light dawned. Initially quite a bit of the TrueCrypt volume would be empty and most of the other stuff was highly compressible. I created the TrueCrypt container locally and added some files. I unmounted the TrueCrypt drive and packed up in a tgz file.