How does encryption protect my data?

[Argus]

John Gray: Does your method work even if you have backed up your D drive VeraCrypt container before mounting it?

I'm not John, but I was going to reply earlier, then John added what I would've written, so I'll add a short comment.

There is no need for the container to be mounted during backup (and if mounted it would have its own volume, not included in the backup job, if not one is created for that volume, or it being inclunded), on the contrary, I would say (I guess there will be a discussion about keeping backups of the same files, encrypted and not encrypted). And if such a container is restored from backup (with or without all other files that also went into the backup) there is no problem to mount the container.

[StuartR]

JMT,

I have two separate partitions on my hard drive, one for data (D:) and one for everything else (C:). In the data partition I have a Veracrypt file that I mount as (F:) to get to my sensitive data. There are very few user files on D:, and these are all in one folder and its subfolders.

All of my personal data on D: is in one folder (and subfolders) that I back up every day.
I backup all the files in F: every day.
These backups are a full backup every Sunday and differential backups every other day of the week.

Once a week I do a full backup the whole of C: and D:, this includes the Veracrypt file.

[ChrisGreaves]

Chris: You always have T: mounted when you run your backups?

Absolutely.
Mounting T: is part of my Autoexec.bat, and my RoboCopy commmands reference drives C: and T:.

That's not really true. Two years ago I made my Backup.bat copy the "appdata\roaming" to the data drive T: as I considered C:\Windows wasn't worth backing up:

Code: Select all

robocopy c:\users\chris070\appdata\roaming T:\users\Chris070 /r:0 /w:0 /s

My Appl\Roaming is backed up with my data.

Hope this helps.
(I am one response away from posting my Back2018.bat)

Cheers
Chris