Backing up an encrypted drive with Time Machine under Snow Leopard

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Level 1

12 points

Backing up an encrypted drive with Time Machine under Snow Leopard

In a nutshell, my question is “Can I back up an encrypted drive using Time Machine under Snow Leopard, and if so, how do I access its data from a previous day?”

I have a 1Tb USB drive connected to my MacBook, which runs Snow Leopard. The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This drive is included in the drives that Time Machine backs up. I used Disk Utility to create an encrypted drive on the USB drive (998Gb), also formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The encrypted drive is not on TimeMachine’s list of excluded files/drives.

When I go into Time Machine, I can see the USB drive and the encrypted drive in the side bar. I can access the files on the encrypted drive as long as I’m looking at how it stands now. But if I move backward in time, the encrypted drive is grayed out and inaccessible. If I click on the USB drive, I get a window that tells me it is 75.9Gb in size, and nothing else is available to me.

When I open the back-up drive in Finder and navigate to Backups.backupdb > macbook name > some date and time, I see my MacBook’s hard drive and the USB drive. The encrypted drive is not shown. When I click on the USB drive, I see an entry for drivename.sparsebundle. When I click on that I’m prompted for the password for the encrypted drive. When I enter it, I get a warning telling me that the disk image could not be opened and that the encrypted drive has no mountable file systems.

Is my encrypted drive really be backed-up and if so, how do I access the backed-up data?

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 5, 2014 7:14 AM

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Answer 1

RodInEC Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 10, 2014 8:58 AM in response to RodInEC

Having received a bunch of views but no replies over the last 5 days, I decided to venture into my local Apple store and ask this same question. The response I got from the geniuses was that you can't get a reliable back-up of an encrypted drive using Time Machine under Snow Leopard. So, my only alternative is to copy the encrypted drive's contents elsewhere, unencrypt the drive, and then copy the contents back. This is what I expected, but not what I wanted to hear.

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