About Lukotta

Why it exists

I wanted backups from a Windows PC and a Mac on the same external disk. The Mac could not open the BitLocker volume, and the existing ways of doing it were more complicated than they needed to be.

Lukotta is built on anylinuxfs, which opens the drive inside a small Linux virtual machine and hands it back to macOS.

anylinuxfs is a command-line tool, which rules it out for most people. There are graphical wrappers for tools like it, but they look and feel like an aeroplane cockpit.

Lukotta's main goal is perfect user experience: plug in the drive, type the password, open it in Finder. A drive should be fully usable on any computer.

Who created and maintains it

Lukotta is being developed by one person. I have spent years in software engineering and UX design, so the interface gets as much attention as the code underneath. Working alone is also more practical than it used to be, because AI-assisted development handles the repetitive work.

Lukotta is not finished. There is interface work still to do and bugs to fix, some of them in the tools it depends on. Reading drives is reliable; writing to them is still experimental.