LUKS Header Backup

I’d neglected backup LUKS headers until Gwern’s data loss postmortem last year. After reading his post I dumped the headers of the drives I had accessible, but I never got around to performing the task on my less frequently accessed drives. Last month I had trouble mounting one of those drives. It turned out I was simply using the wrong passphrase, but the experience prompted me to make sure I had completed the header backup procedure for all drives.

I dump the header to memory using the procedure from the Arch wiki. This is probably unnecessary, but only takes a few extra steps. The header is stored in my password store, which is obsessively backed up.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/tmp
$ sudo mount ramfs /mnt/tmp -t ramfs
$ sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/sdc --header-backup-file /mnt/tmp/dump
$ sudo chown pigmonkey:pigmonkey /mnt/tmp/dump
$ pass insert -m crypt/luksheader/themisto < /mnt/tmp/dump
$ sudo umount /mnt/tmp
$ sudo rmdir /mnt/tmp