Questions about restoring an install to a new encrypted install using Timeshift

[Elliot Alderson]

Rather than starting a new thread, I'll piggyback off this one.
I've read, and see it confirmed here, that post-installation encryption is possible but not worth the hassle, but I just wanted to bounce an idea off the experts.
I have both Timeshift & Rescuezilla images/backups.
If I install fresh from scratch, and I restore an image from Timeshift or the full image from rescuezilla, does the encryption stick, or does the recovered data stay in its original unencrypted form?

[claydoh]

Rather than starting a new thread, I'll piggyback off this one.

I will split this off, since it is a different topic. It will get more eyeballs and comments that way.

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With Timeshift, I assume using its default rsync "snapshot" (which is NOT an image) this should work, I *think*, for what you want. Not 100% sure, though, and probably more like 33%, and only because I have not used Timeshift using this, nor looked into docs or trawled the Linux Mint forums on the topic—it is their software. It sounds like it should be what you want, assuming it can restore to a fresh OS install.

If it is BTRFS snapshots using Timeshift (also not an image), you can use these with encryption, iirc, but you can't restore a snapshot from a previous filesystem to a new filesystem, since these are part of that filesystem. The snapshots are gone as soon as you format the partition.

Some TMI:
(Now with btrfs you can "send" the snapshot to a different btrfs filesystem, and even to a file, but this is, in my opinion, even more complicated and confusing than encrypting post-install, I have done the latter in the past (different encryption scheme than today, I believe). But I don't quite get how to do the former yet, because my attention span is shot and I am impatient. And Timeshift can't do it at all., so it is all manual command line foo and bar).

Rescuzilla is making bit-for-bit drive copies/clones, so that won't help here.

[Elliot Alderson]

Thanks, claydoh. I appreciate the feedback. I guess my best bet is to try it and report back in case someone has the same thought.