Time machine thinks network volume is encrypted when it is not

I created a Time Machine backup of my computer on a networked volume. Then my hard drive in my mac failed, so I replaced the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system. After installing the OS again Time Machine won't recover the files from the backup because it thinks the backup is encrypted. I am pretty sure I never set up encryption on the network volume and this is just a bug.


I have read that using the Time Machine backup appliance you can press a button on the back and temporarily suspend the use of encryption for 5 minutes to allow access to the files on a volume that is encrypted, so it seems like there should be some kind of workaround for a disk that isn't encrypted at all.


Any idea how to recover files from a network backup?

Mac Pro

Posted on Jul 7, 2020 12:24 PM

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Posted on Jul 8, 2020 7:03 AM

I don't want to lose all my music, all my videos, all my books, all my photos, etc., so creating a new backup doesn't address my issue.


Actually I solved the problem eventually once I realized that the error message is misleading and the root cause has nothing to do with encryption. The password for my user account on the network volume is different than the password on the Mac and the newly installed Mac OS did not have the password to log into the network server in the keychain. It reported the error as if the drive was encrypted.


The solution was to go to the network server and force a password update on the user account and then use the new password to connect to the network volume from the Mac. After that I could connect to the Time Machine backups without a problem.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 8, 2020 7:03 AM in response to QuickPost

I don't want to lose all my music, all my videos, all my books, all my photos, etc., so creating a new backup doesn't address my issue.


Actually I solved the problem eventually once I realized that the error message is misleading and the root cause has nothing to do with encryption. The password for my user account on the network volume is different than the password on the Mac and the newly installed Mac OS did not have the password to log into the network server in the keychain. It reported the error as if the drive was encrypted.


The solution was to go to the network server and force a password update on the user account and then use the new password to connect to the network volume from the Mac. After that I could connect to the Time Machine backups without a problem.

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Time machine thinks network volume is encrypted when it is not

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