Getting GELI Keys from Floppy

[Bob Johnson]

On 9/6/06, Barkley Vowk <bvowk at math.ualberta.ca> wrote:
> You are a complete madman. You want to protect your data with a key stored
> on the most completely and utterly unreliable form of data storage still
> lamentably in use? Its not the 1970's anymore, get a real data storage
> medium!
>
> Get a usb flash drive, from there its a simple matter of changing the geli
> script to mount a specific usb device before starting. Look in
> /etc/rc.d/geli and geli2. I'd put your mounting and checks between the
> kldstat and the "if [ -z" in the geli_start() sub.

I have floppies from the 1980s that are still readable, but I have
never had a USB flash drive last more than six months when actually in
use.  For important data, I trust a floppy far more than I trust a
flash drive. The big problem with floppies is they don't hold enough
data. For that matter, writeable CDs and DVDs have proven to be much
less reliable than floppies, too.

- Bob