Jan 31 |
Requirements:
- Home folder to be encrypted.
- Don’t need my Time Machine disk to be encrypted
First, make sure your Time Machine setup is functioning properly.
The XCode installed, as it uses Property List Editor
(Note: you’ll need to change the process a bit if you use a different property list editor.)
How to do that:
You will need to manually edit the preference file for Time Machine, adding the ID string of your File Vault disk to the list of disks to backup. You can’t do this from within System Preferences or otherwise.
One way of finding the ID string of the disk is to open com.apple.finder.plist, located in your user’s /Library/Preferences folder, and look for the FXRecentFolders item.
One of the entries should contain the name of your home folder (your login name) together with an entry called file-data. If it doesn’t, you need to close the plist and visit your home folder in Finder. This will make it a ‘recent folder,’ and then you can check the file again.
The value of _CFURLAliasData inside file-data is the string we need, including the enclosing < and >. Copy this to the clipboard.
Now, disable Time Machine from within System Preferences, make a back up of com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, located in /Library/Preferences, and then open the original file in Property List Editor. Select IncludedVolumes and click Add Child. Select type Data and paste the string you copied earlier.
(If IncludedVolumes doesn’t exist, select Root and click Add Child. Name the new entry IncludedVolumes and make it type Array. Then do the above.)
Check that the path to your home folder isn’t listed in any of the items ExcludeByPath, ExcludedVolumes, or SkipPaths. Save and quit the editor.
Select Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu bar extra to start an initial backup.
Note: You may already have a backup of your image file (located in the hidden folder /Users/.username), in which case you will have duplicates. You might want to exclude this from your backup.
When browsing your backup, your unencrypted home folder will be on the Computer level, alongside your startup disk. Not where it normally is — under /Users — since it is treated like a regular disk.
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May 31st, 2010 at 5:12 PM
One clarification:
In the first paragraph, you say to “open com.apple.finder.plist, located in your user’s /Library/Preferences folder”
…My system did not have such a file. I think you meant to open the one in the user’s Library, at /Library/Preferences (in UNIX speak, ~/Library/Preferences)
….Later in the tutorial, you say to “make a back up of com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, located in /Library/Preferences, and then open the original file”. This time you really did mean root of the drive (/Library/Preferences).
THANKS for posting this awesome HowTo. It worked for me, and totally saved my behind. I use a complicated setup similar to the one in this post:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2336923&tstart=1
Mounted (i.e. open) disk images were backed up via Time Machine automatically in Leopard 10.5, but apparently this behavior was changed in 10.6. I don’t feel comfortable backing up the sparsebundle itself, since it is open all the time, and read/write operations will not necessarily synchronize. Now, thanks to your hint, I’m back to the way things were.
BTW: I back up to an encrypted sparsebundle as my Time Machine destination drive, so my encrypted data *stays* encrypted at the end of the day.
Thanks again!
June 14th, 2010 at 2:10 PM
This article is great. One thing it omits though is that on Snow Leopard you have to provide not only “IncludedVolumes” field obtained as described above – but also “IncludedVolumeUUIDs” that can be obtained via:
$ diskutil info /Users/username
The fun part is – IncludedVolumes one can put in best using Plist Editor, as described in the article. For IncludedVolumeUUIDs it is easier to edit plist file with TextWrangler. Without [u]both[/u] of these entries Time Machine won’t pick up the VileVault directory for backup.
Oh and it works! Tested!