Good morning/afternoon/evening all,

I recently added encryption on a couple of my drives, but I have some questions about it. My expectation was that each time the array was started or stopped, I would need to supply my passphrase to unlock the drives which are encrypted. In practice, this doesn't appear to be the case.

I've done some reading through historical discussions on the forums here, and it looks like there was a time when the encryption key was stored in plaintext, which seems to have been changed, as I'm not seeing any keyfile under root, which is great. But that leaves the question: where IS my key being stored, since stopping and starting the array seems to work without requiring that I re-enter my passphrase, so it's being held somewhere (presumably in memory?). Is a reboot, then, the only time a prompt might appear asking for the passphrase?

Unfortunately, the documentation (Encrypting your data | Unraid Docs) on encrypting drives hasn't been much help in describing the actual expected behavior here or if/how encryption keys are persisted, which is why I'm creating a post. Given the changes over the years to how encryption works, the forums haven't been an easy thing to filter through on this subject. Can someone enlighten me? I'm not looking for any sort of encryption key automation here, I'm fine with having to input my passphrase, but after multiple stops and starts (I have not needed to reboot yet), that hasn't been required.

Thanks in advance.

Edited July 15Jul 15 by audioclass

33 minutes ago, audioclass said:

My expectation was that each time the array was started or stopped

Only the first time, then it's kept in memory; only after a reboot will it ask for it again. If using a keyfile, you can delete it after the array start (next to array stop button) and in that case, it will ask for it after an array stop.