Is there a way to have a password on Time Machine backup without encrypting the whole drive?

[aisajib]

I have a Transcend 1TB external hard drive that I use for Time Machine backups. Now obviously I don't want anyone to be able to use it to restore my whole computer on their machine, so I password-protected the drive and encrypted it for better security.

As it turns out, encrypting the whole drive takes a little more than forever.

I looked around and figured out that it takes a lot of time for the initial encryption. So I wasn't worried about it as long as the backups were quick later on. I've just initiated a Time Machine backup sized at about 90 GB, and it's been over 2 hours. That's too slow for me.

So I was wondering, is there a way I can keep a password on the drive (so that it asks for a password every time you connect it) while not keeping the entire drive encrypted? I want the password so that anyone cannot access it. I want it unencrypted because the backups need to go faster.

Any ideas?

 

[Kissmyne]

For your uses, Time Machine Encryption would be the way to go(get a faster HDD).

However you can also create Password Protected Disk Images using Disk Utility...

 

[talmy]

I looked around and figured out that it takes a lot of time for the initial encryption. So I wasn't worried about it as long as the backups were quick later on. I've just initiated a Time Machine backup sized at about 90 GB, and it's been over 2 hours. That's too slow for me.

The only way to password protect a drive is to encrypt it. The password is the encryption key. That said an encrypted drive is not noticeably slower than a non-encrypted drive. Backing up 90GB through Time Machine will take a long time. Time Machine is intended for incremental backups at frequent intervals. If your intent is to occasionally connect the drive for backing up you would be much better off cloning your internal drive to the external using a program like SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner. You can still encrypt the external drive.