Loopback mountable encryption for an existing partition image

Question

Is there a way to encrypt an existing filesystem in a file that is mountable via loopback?

I thought I had a simple plan for moving from an old notebook to a new one, but actually something does not seem to work the way I think or I'm the only one to think of this way.

Anyway, I want an accessible, as in loopback mountable full partition backup of my old system and I wan't it encrypted.

So what I thought I would do is dd of the old partition to another harddrive, run some crypto magic and have a mountable encrypted backup.

After having spent two hours reading up on the topic it seems as neither truecrypt nor the in kernel crypto stuff work that way that you can just somehow encrypt an existing partition image.

So what I want to do is the following:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/old-notebook.bin 
*crypt* /media/old-notebook.bin
mount *some magic options here* /media/old-notebook.bin /mnt
cd /mnt/home/foo

Is there a way I'm missing?

Answer 1

Ok, turns out it works with dm-crypt mostly as I want it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/crypted-backup.bin bs=512 count=`blockdev --getsize /dev/hdb2`
losetup /dev/loop0 /media/crypted-backup.bin
cryptsetup -c aes -h ripemd160 -y create cryptvol1 /dev/loop0
dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=/dev/mapper/cryptvol1 bs=4k

That's not exactly an existing image, but as I was going to create the image anyway this solves the problem for me.