Comments on: Encrypt Time Machine and Time Capsule backups

By: John

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

Regarding Snow Leopard, I found a fix:

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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!

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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

By: Heiko

Heiko — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:42:36 +0000

Worked fine for me. However as you said, when I wanted to restore a crashed MB Air with a new empty system harddrive, I was asked whether I wanted to install from a TimeMAchine Backup. When I selected that, instead of prompting me for the password, it just said it couldn’t get access. So I had to first create a new account, then do mount the encrypted image and store passwords in the system keychain and then run migration assistant. However the next trouble then was, that the backup created another user and some MS-Office installation (that hadn’t been backed up) went weird when confronted with the restored account and kept whining about some missing database.
So what I did now is decrypt the whole backup again and retry to do a straigt restore without extra account ans stuff. I’ll see.
Just to let you know my ‘Case Study’.
Cheers – Heiko

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:37:10 +0000

Hi, I can’t seem to get to my Time Capsule Drive. I just get “No such file or directory” in terminal.

By: jason

jason — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:29:53 +0000

Mike: You’re right. I had actually noticed that my home directory wasn’t in the Time Machine backups anymore. I’ve removed that line. Thanks for that catch