Saturday, February 11, 2012

Time Machine for Lion supports encrypted backups

In the midst of tweaking a Time Capsule backup, I noticed a grayed out option to encrypt my backup.

Turns out 10.7 enables Time Machine encryption on Lion - but only for directly connected drives.

Reading the MacOS X hints commentary I think they're missing the point. A good backup strategy requires offsite backup, and taking a non-encrypted backup offsite is somewhat risky. I don't take my Time Capsule backups offsite, but I do rotate my Carbon Copy Cloner images/backups -- and they are encrypted.

This is a good feature if used wisely.

4 comments:

Martin said...

Encryption for offsite backups is a necessity IMHO. The offsite itself might not be the problem but the way thereto – I encrypt my MacBook for the same reason.

I have used for some weeks now too, I even paid for the software – thanks to your recommendation. In comparison to SuperDuper!, I like the archive feature (although the last update slightly changed the name of the archive main directory), scheduled tasks and the 'run this task when source or destination is reconnected' funktion (works even with sparse bundles!). Support is great too. I am wondering, however, for how long such software will remain possible on the Mac.

P.S.: Did you intentionally crosspost on Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech?

JGF said...

No, the crosspost was a goof. Had the wrong blog value in MarsEdit. I deleted the notes version...

Good to know you like Carbon Copy Cloner. I'm happy it's being supported. I like the combination of CCC and Time Capsule.

Martin said...

BTW, CC and TM share one major flow: They both do not support incremental backups. It is therefore for example not possible to create backups of virtual machines since backup runs would take forever.

JGF said...

Yeah, VM backup is very definitely an unsolved problem. You can create a VMware image that stripes the VM across many smaller files; then only the ones that change get backed up. I'm worried, however, that this backup won't actually restore.

Do you know Mac software that works for this?