In this economy, I somehow managed to get my hands on a brand new 18TB IronWolf Pro HDD for $500.

I have four 4TB SSDs on top of which I have made a logical volume with lvm, which in turn I encrypted with LUKS. Now, I want to backup everything inside that LUKS container, but I’m a little but unsure of which “layer” to copy or to clone.

  1. Just cp/dd the contents of the LUKS container like I would any other file?
  2. dd the LUKS container itself - in other words, close the container and copy/clone the mapped volume, which is encrypted?
  3. dd the logical LVM volume - in other words, close/“unmap”/whatever the logical volume and dd?
  4. dd the underlying raw disks? Although I don’t see how that would be recoverable/usable/readable on the backup HDD.

The data is not critical. It’s just some Linux ISOs that would be nice to have backed up so that I don’t have to download them again.

Edit: the HDD is to be installed on the same system as the SSDs. The HDD is also going to be encrypted, but without a logical volume, since it has enough space on its own.

Please advise. 😊