Backup of GPG private keys?

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2022 08:15, Mogens Jensen said:
> As of GnuPG (LTS) version 2.2.33, what is the recommended way to backup
> your GPG private keys on a Linux system?

For just the private keys you can tar up the private-keys-v1.d
directory, encrypt it with gpg (you might want to use a password (-c)
then).  But such a backup has no public keys and they can't be
re-generated from the backup-ed private keys.  However, the other data
below ~/.gnupg is not highly sensitive can can be part of the regular
backup.

> 1. Backing up the entire ~./gnupg directory?

That is of course a working option but recall that the data has the
private keys and you should encrypt it.

> 2. Exporting only the keys?
>
>   $ gpg --armor --export-secret-keys >gpg-key-backup.asc

That is possible, but, frankly, the OpenPGP format for encrypted private
keys is not as strong as it should be - thus you better add an
additional encryption layer.  The actual problem here is that you need
to provide the passphrase for each key.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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