Time Machine Password Protect

[delfmen]

Hi All,

I am a long time reader of the main page but finally had a question worth posting as I can't find the answer anywhere.

I use Time Machine to back up my data and am very satisfied but have one problem with it. Is there anyway to password protect the backed up data or even the entire external hard drive?

My user account is password protected but it appears as if anyone who has physical access to my external hard drive can access all of my information. If this is the case, how can I protect my data?

Thanks for the help!

[John01021988]

yeah thats a great question, hopefully someone has an answer.

[delfmen]

A possible solution:

Right click on the Backups.backupdb folder and select Get Info. Then go to Sharing & Permissions and change the everyone group to No Access privilege.

When this is selected it lets me view the folders and subfolders on my Guest account but it does not allow me to see or access files within those folders.

I will have to try and plug my Hard Drive into another machine to see what happens but this is good enough for me (having my folder structure revealed but not my folders).

Not sure how secure this method is though.

[richard.mac]

A possible solution:

Right click on the Backups.backupdb folder and select Get Info. Then go to Sharing & Permissions and change the everyone group to No Access privilege.

When this is selected it lets me view the folders and subfolders on my Guest account but it does not allow me to see or access files within those folders.

I will have to try and plug my Hard Drive into another machine to see what happens but this is good enough for me (having my folder structure revealed but not my folders).

Not sure how secure this method is though.

does this still allow you to restore and delete files in the space interface?

[John01021988]

does this still allow you to restore and delete files in the space interface?

I thought the same thing, there might be some problems when you try to restore files from the interface

[cheyz]

hey, I have the same question and wonder if you guys have found a good solution?
thanks,
Chey

[fredjames]

SO..
Go to System preferences, under System tab click Time Machine.
Click Change Disk
Click Set Up Time Capsule
Click Manual Setup
Then Click Time Capsule
That should do it

[tekio]

A possible solution:

Right click on the Backups.backupdb folder and select Get Info. Then go to Sharing & Permissions and change the everyone group to No Access privilege.

Not sure how secure this method is though.

It's not secure, anybody that plugs in into a mac or linux box will have access to the data.

[LyonHumper]

So I am online right now with Apple Support. After a thorough Internet search I found nothing so I contacted Apple Directly. They are telling me that there is something called File Vault. Biggest issue of concern here though is that if you forget your password on this...no one will ever be able to get the info back. They were really serious about this.

Thing is, I tried to set it up but could not get it to work. It said that it would protect my computer, but not my external hard drive. Now that this excellent forum has a clue on what to do, I turn it over to someone who can figure it out from there.

Last thing...Apple said that there is nothing specifically designed right now to secure time machine. Maybe a request should be sent to them for a fix in the next update.

[saberahul]

Has anyone found a solution to this yet? I want to connect my external hard disk to my router but don't want other macs having access to my backups. How would I go about protecting my data?

[Bear]

...
My user account is password protected but it appears as if anyone who has physical access to my external hard drive can access all of my information. If this is the case, how can I protect my data? Currently the above suggestion about changing the access info doesn't mean squat if someone can grab your disk.

And a simple password protection won't help much either.

What you want is for your data to be encrypted. This may or may not be possible now using 3rd party encryption tools.

However, with Lion, you'll be able to do full disk encryption with FileVault and this will solve the physical access to your drive question. However, don't lose your encryption key. (I'm not sure if it's just a password or what as I have not read the Lion documentation.) If you lose it(forget the password for it) you lose access to the back up.