I have a question regarding the recommended openSUSE (13.1) way is for automatically, at boot, mounting an encrypted USB disk. I know how to manually mount the disk but I am just wondering what the best way would be to do it automatically, except for entering the pass-phrase. I don’t mind entering that by hand.
The scenario is as follows:
On my system, all partitions that hold data or temporary data (/home, /tmp, /var/tmp and swap) are encrypted. I want to regularly backup the home partition to an external USB hard drive, via Backintime. This is done using a schedule so that I don’t forget to start the backup. Obviously, if the hard drive isn’t mounted, the backup fails because there is no destination to write to. Because I don’t want to have to remember mounting this drive by hand each time, I want the drive to be mounted at boot time by the system.
I know I can mount the disk manually as follows:
# cryptsetup open /dev/sdc1 backup
This opens the encrypted disk, which I can then mount the ordinary way:
# mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/backup /mnt/backup
In order to achieve the above automatically, is it sufficient to create an entry in /etc/crypttab?
Are there other/better ways or caveats that I should be aware of?