Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Encrypted backups

Jethryn Freyman

Jethryn Freyman

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Aug 9, 2007
2,329
3
Australia
I'm about to encrypt my hard drive with PGP Whole Disk, since Filevault just isn't good enough.

I want encrypted backups too, and don't want to use standard OS X encrypted disk images.

I plan to backup to a Truecrypt image or Truecrypt encrypted disk with either Time Machine or Super Duper. Has anybody done this?

To restore from a backup, I'd assume I'd first need to decrypt the backup disk, then restore it from the OS X installer as usual. Would this work? Has anybody done this before? So long as I copy all files, visible and invisible, everything should work fine - right?
 
Things to watch out for. TrueCrypt seems to only support FAT. I started looking at if having NTFS-3G lets this be changed, but haven't confirmed anything.

Also, you'll have to make sure the encrypted backup volume is present when the backup occurs, which you may be trying to run on a schedule so you won't always be present to give the password for.

I haven't given PGP a try for full disk so can't give more insight than that.
 
i use truecrypt quite a bit on both ntfs and fat and have had no problems, havent tried it on the mac yet though. i agree, the partition must be present for the backup to occur so this might pose a problem depending on your setup. pgp is going to be more of a set it and forget it solution but i use pgp quite a bit at work and have grown to hate it.

edit: (oops i meant i use truecrypt on ntfs and ext3 with zero problems) thinking about one thing and typed another. just havent tried it with the mac yet
 
PGP WDE doesn't support Snow Kitty right now. Just keep that in mind if you plan to use or am using Snow Leopard.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back