On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 08:27:52PM -0700, Bryan Stenson wrote: > The FAQ covering FDE suggests a 1 MB RAID partition...wondering where that > size recommendation came from. > > I'm interested in backing up this key to a private bitwarden instance > (base64 encoded), and was curious if the 1 MB size was a crypto > recommendation, or based on a partition size minimum?
The actual data stored on the keydisk is only a few hundred bytes. Most of that is metadata about the volume. The 1 Mb size recommendation is fairly arbitrary. There is certainly not 1 Mb of key data there. Using a smaller parition for the keydisk does not directly affect the encryption in any way. (Although if you try to create a keydisk on a ridiculously small volume, such as 2 Kb, it will likely appear to work at the time of creation but then fail to re-attach after being detached.) Also note: * The metadata might change and grow in the future, so hard-coding a backup script to copy the exact current size might lead to problems if it does, and you don't regularly test that your script is actually backing up all of the data.
