Comments on: Encrypt Time Machine and Time Capsule backups

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:25:03 +0000

@Sebastian: Did you move the com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist from the unencrypted file to the encrypted one?
What, if you place the Time Machine.app into the dock? Then right click on the dock icon, choose ‘browse other time machine disks’ and select the encrypted file.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:38:10 +0000

EDIT: I’m using 10.6.3, and created the encrypted sparse bundle with the same version.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:36:15 +0000

Hmm, TM seems to backup just fine (no errors, …) and Back-In-Time shows the increments.

But: the Finder “Galaxy” view doesn’t work (makes no difference whether the encrypted sparse bundle is mounted or not): it only shows “Now” as available increment, and “Today” (greyed out). There are no older increments shown (although I can confirm that there are stored in the backup, using Back-In-Time).

Any ideas?

By: John

John — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:42:54 +0000

Regarding Snow Leopard, I found a fix:

—
There are a few changes when creating an encrypted Time Machine backup under Snow Leopard:

1. The name of the sparse bundle no longer contains a (which was in fact the Ethernet adapter address). It is now simply named .sparsebundle.
2. The unique machine identifier is now hidden in the sparsebundle. After you create the encrypted image, open the contents of both sparsebundles (in the Finder, right-click on the sparsebundles, “Show Package Contents”) and move the file “com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist” from the old sparsebundle to the new one.
3. That’s it. Start the Time Machine Backup and it should work.

P.S. If you created your encrypted Time Machine backup under Leopard, it will still work unchanged when you upgrade to Snow Leopard. These changes apply only if you create a new Time Machine backup under Snow Leopard. Hope this helps!

—-

From: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=434960#8

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:49:48 +0000

One glitch for me – when you double click the sparsebundle in the GUI (ie Finder) and the image is mounted. After you have created the keychain entries, but before you start TM on the bundle I needed to eject (unmount) the sparsebundle – otherwise TM seemed to think it was busy and failed to mount.

For me I was actually creating a new bundle from scratch on a remote NAS – following the instructions here: http://www.readynas.com/?p=253

With the extra steps above seems to work ok with encryption too…..

By: John

John — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:20:39 +0000

Hmm. It seems it does not work with SL anymore. Time Machine is not using the converted sparseimage, it always creates a new one called name_mac1.tmp.sparseimage and uses this.

Any ideas?

By: Iteranium

Iteranium — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:08:02 +0000

Hey, thanks for the tutorial. I got a backup HDD out of the house and I just took a 256 bit encrypted sparseimage from the disk util and then put my data in there with rsync. That way I don’t have to manipulate Apple software in doing what I want. Well, rsync does not have shiny interface, but it does what it is supposed to without any “hacks”.

By: Sebastien Varrette

Sebastien Varrette — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:35:35 +0000

Hi,

For info, to limit the maximum size of the backup (100G in this example), the convert command is the following:

hdiutil convert -format UDSB -o name_mac.sparsebundle -encryption AES-256 -tgtimagekey size=100g name_mac-old.sparsebundle

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:34:52 +0000

sorry commands not correctly displayed

command to decrypt should read

hdiutil convert -format UDSB -o name_macaddress_new.sparsebundle name_macaddress.sparsebundle

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:33:11 +0000

Heiko
please let us know the command for decrypting the sparseimage
simply convert with the same command without

in the middle?
YES
just tested
hdiutil convert -format UDSB -o __new.sparsebundle __.sparsebundle