Hey everyone. As part of my backup strategy, I backup unreplaceable files (documents, family photos & videos) from Unraid to an external drive that I keep at my office and sync with new/altered files a few times a year. 

 

Previously, I was using the Duplicati docker to create encrypted backup files on an NTFS-formatted HDD. But, based on some reading, I became leery of relying on Duplicati for my critical backup needs (I also use it to create encrypted backups to OneDrive). So I replaced the NTFS-formatted HDD for an external NVME drive formatted (using UnRaid) as BTRFS-encrypted and copied files directly to it. This had the desired effect, UnRaid can mount the drive without issue and read the files, but a Windows machine doesn't even see the drive when plugged in. It's not that I don't trust my fellow coworkers, but it's good to know that the drive itself is not readily accessible by common means - I don't think anyone I work with is even familiar with Linux much less Linux filesystems.

 

But it does raise a question for me. What if, for whatever reason, UnRaid is unavailable to me? Am I still able to mount this drive using other distributions, say Mint or Ubuntu? I'm not deep into Linux, I've only played around with Ubuntu and Mint to see what they were about, but haven't really touched them for years. Any way for Windows to mount BTRFS-encrypted, even in read-only?

 

I think Unraid being unavailable is extremely unlikely, but in a real black swan event, are there other options to read this drive?

 

Thank for any replies/comments.

All Unraid drives are readable on standard Linux distributions.