Re: Passing dar encryption passwords

On Fri, 7 Jan 2022 22:00:24 +0100
Denis Corbin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 07/01/2022 17:33, David Niklas wrote:
> > Hello,
>
> Hello David,
>
> > I'm using Dar 2.5.17.
> whaoo, that's a not a recent one :) but no problem

It's on a soon to be updated Devuan (Debian) LTS distro.

> > I'm using the -K option to encrypt a full backup. I then tried to
> > create a separate catalog for each file. I'm invoking dar like this,
> > but with a config file (DCF):
> > dar -C backup-cat -A backup -K algorithm:password -3 sha512
> >
> > Now my intention is to have both the backup and backup-cat file
> > encrypted. I think dar is doing this,
>
> yes it can do that,
>
> > but it asks for a password to
> > decrypt the backup archive so that it can isolate the catalog.
>
> of course you need the key to read the backup content
>
> >   I thought that the -J option was to be used with the -A option so
> > that you could give dar the password without having to retype it a
> > million times, but the man page specifies that the -J option is not
> > needed anymore.
>
> -J (and -K when reading an archive) is not needed because dar now
> detects when a backup is encrypted, reads the encryption algorithm from
> the backup header but still needs a key to decipher the data. Else if
> you could read your backup without password, anybody could do the same
> and your data would not be protected...
>
> But as you know, while it is not required, you can still use -J option
> to specify the key (from a DCF file for example) in order to decipher
> the backup or reference avoiding dar asking for the password
> interactively.
>
> > However, even with -J, I'm still getting prompted for a
> > password to open the backup archive.
>
> Strange, it should not be the case. Maybe you have conditional
> statements in your DCF file?

When you mentioned that, it occurred to me that I'm doing the
conditionals by hand currently so I needed to change the -B option to the
catalog file's name.

It's always those "right in front of your face" problems that are the
hardest to fix.

Thanks again!
David