"Hacking" Into my own 500 GB Seagate External Hard-drive

Question

Throughout college—and dating back before high school—I had been backing up important information/application etc… on an external 500 GB Seagate Hard Drive.

I was anxious about losing the contents of the hard drive, I went ahead and encrypted the drive; not with TrueCrypt but encryption software provided by Seagate. The password itself was anywhere between 20-40 characters all of which were a proper mixture of symbols, numbers, etc… So here is the problem: I kept the written password in a small journal which, I lost in the transition out of college.

So being that it is my hard-drive with my own material, how would I go about “cracking” my own encryption and maintaining the information on the drive? (It was and still is formatted for Mountain Lion, and my current OS is a linux distro). Does anyone have any such recommendations?

Solution

You will not be alive long enough for a computer to crack your password.

According to “How Secure Is My Password?” if your password is 20 characters long and was 12345678901234567890, it would take 792 years to crack it.

If it were 40 characters it would take 75 quattuorvigintillion years.

Based on this it will take between 792 and 75 quattuorvigintillion years to figure out your password.

Comments

[bwDraco]

I don't think it can feasibly be done considering the length of the password.

[Zeiss Ikon]

Your best bet is to retrace your steps and find that little journal. Next best chance might be hypnosis to try to recall the password you presumably typed hundreds of times (which may or may not work if you can't run the Mac encryption software). Beyond that, you're pretty much screwed.

[heavyd]

knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/205983en#12 Did you create any password recovery disks/files? Otherwise, your data is probably toast.

[anxious]

I did not create any such recovery files- Ironically, I kept everything complex/written on paper because I was terrified of it being "accessed" or damaged- I thought I might be able to crack it, thinking that because I didn't use Truecrypt

[heavyd]

Also, it looks like the early products ~2005-2006 used 3DES encryption, which has known weaknesses, so if you're using one of them, you might have a chance. Newer products use AES encryption, which will be more difficult to crack.

[Keltari]

Not quite. It will take UP TO those numbers. It could be cracked on the first attempt and take a fraction of a second