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macmba

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 10, 2011
39
0
I have a 50GB TM machine backup. Am using a partition (of 128GB) from my external HDD, which is dedicated to TM backups and formatted with MAC's partition.

Here is the really frustrating things;
1) I cannot encrypt it unless the WHOLE drive is one partition and the WHOLE drive is formatted with a MAC partition... WHY?!!! Why would Apple care if am using a partition, and even though the backup DOES work on it, why would they not encrypt it? Its plain stupid.

2) I said myself ok, I will do the backup first, and then transfer it to my other partition which has Truecrypt encrypting it. Well, the TM wont allow to transfer the backup from a MAC partition to a non-MAC partition. Why?! I understand the whole different partitions, etc, but its a backup, I would want to keep a backup of a backup..

So what are my options right now? am NOT going to buy an external HDD just to have an encrypted backup of my MBA, its a waste and its not that practical.. Also, I dont wanna leave my backup unencrypted, its stupid.

Any solutions please?
 
this is your second thread about this very same topic, everyone explained TM as completely as possible in your last thread, you didn't seem to grasp the idea though.
and now when i saw this come up i recognized your screen name immediately.
refer to your other thread for help
 
this is your second thread about this very same topic, everyone explained TM as completely as possible in your last thread, you didn't seem to grasp the idea though.
and now when i saw this come up i recognized your screen name immediately.
refer to your other thread for help

Hmm, did you notice that these questions are completely different?

Also, did you notice that I concluded on what am I going to do with TM to suit my needs? I will remind you: I mentioned that I will turn ON/OFF the TM only when a backup needs to be done, so the old thread is useless at this point. These points here are new issues, hence the new thread. But thanks for reminding me about my old thread.
 
I have a 50GB TM machine backup. Am using a partition (of 128GB) from my external HDD, which is dedicated to TM backups and formatted with MAC's partition.

Here is the really frustrating things;
1) I cannot encrypt it unless the WHOLE drive is one partition and the WHOLE drive is formatted with a MAC partition... WHY?!!! Why would Apple care if am using a partition, and even though the backup DOES work on it, why would they not encrypt it? Its plain stupid.

2) I said myself ok, I will do the backup first, and then transfer it to my other partition which has Truecrypt encrypting it. Well, the TM wont allow to transfer the backup from a MAC partition to a non-MAC partition. Why?! I understand the whole different partitions, etc, but its a backup, I would want to keep a backup of a backup..

So what are my options right now? am NOT going to buy an external HDD just to have an encrypted backup of my MBA, its a waste and its not that practical.. Also, I dont wanna leave my backup unencrypted, its stupid.

Any solutions please?

seems like the following should work, change X and Y accordingly (get them from diskutil list):

diskutil cs convert diskXsY -passphrase mysecret
 
seems like the following should work, change X and Y accordingly (get them from diskutil list):

diskutil cs convert diskXsY -passphrase mysecret

Thanks. Maybe I can create a small partition and try that command on it first..
 
Well, the TM wont allow to transfer the backup from a MAC partition to a non-MAC partition. Why?!

Probably has to do with Time Machine using directory hard links in its folder structure, which isn't necessarily supported well if you try to move it to a different partition format.

Any solutions please?

As suggested in your other thread, if you require encrypted backups to a partition, you ought to look at Carbon Copy Cloner or similar products.
 
Probably has to do with Time Machine using directory hard links in its folder structure, which isn't necessarily supported well if you try to move it to a different partition format.



As suggested in your other thread, if you require encrypted backups to a partition, you ought to look at Carbon Copy Cloner or similar products.

I installed and downloaded CCC, but its more like dd on unix. Its not really meant to have the same structure as TM. Its more like a cloning solution, which also according to them, might or might not work across different MAC OS versions.
 
I installed and downloaded CCC, but its more like dd on unix. Its not really meant to have the same structure as TM. Its more like a cloning solution, which also according to them, might or might not work across different MAC OS versions.

CCC does have block level copy as an option, but it does a lot more than dd.

You're correct, CCC works quite differently from TM, which seems to be what you want. TM does versioning and differential hourly/daily/weekly backups on a continual basis. You seemed to indicate in your other thread that you don't want this, you want snapshots you can do every couple weeks or so.

Reread the page on CCC -- if you're restoring an entire computer then restoring a clone from a different OS version may be problematic due to settings and such, which is why they suggest using Migration Assistant from the image in that instance.
 
CCC does have block level copy as an option, but it does a lot more than dd.

You're correct, CCC works quite differently from TM, which seems to be what you want. TM does versioning and differential hourly/daily/weekly backups on a continual basis. You seemed to indicate in your other thread that you don't want this, you want snapshots you can do every couple weeks or so.

Reread the page on CCC -- if you're restoring an entire computer then restoring a clone from a different OS version may be problematic due to settings and such, which is why they suggest using Migration Assistant from the image in that instance.


Exactly, but my problem with the time machine doing differential backups is solved easily by only turning it ON when I need it, so problem solved there. The only issues is encrypting the backup, and/or transferring it to another partition that is not Journaled (aka not HFS+).

Worse, I cannot even use tar to make a compressed file out of it:

tar: failed to open 'Backups.backupdb'. The permissions are fine, and I did it under root.

The ONLY thing that seems to work so far is:

cp -Rf Backups.backupdb /Volumes/NTFS_partition_400/ (which is my NTFS partition. I believe I would have to use the -p option to preserve permissions.)

On a side note, looking at the backup.log file, it seems that the TM excludes automatically the following from any and all TM backups:

Excluding /.DocumentRevisions-V100: 180 KB (14 items)
Excluding /.MobileBackups: 17.0 MB (462 items)
Excluding /.Spotlight-V100: 63.8 MB (823 items)
Excluding /.Trashes: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /.fseventsd: 4 KB (1 items)
Excluding /Library/Updates: 568 KB (1 items)
Excluding /Users/Shared/SC Info: 364 KB (4 items)
Excluding /private/var/db/efw_cache: 4 KB (1 items)
Excluding /Volumes: 4 KB (6 items)
Excluding /Network: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /.vol: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /cores: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /private/tmp: 16 KB (11 items)
Excluding /private/tftpboot: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /private/var/folders: 243.2 MB (264 items)
Excluding /private/var/run: 76 KB (28 items)
Excluding /private/var/tmp: 197.9 MB (5866 items)
Excluding /private/var/vm: 4.1 GB (3 items)
Excluding /private/var/db/dhcpclient: 8 KB (3 items)
Excluding /Library/Caches: 736 KB (14 items)
Excluding /Library/Logs: 9.3 MB (115 items)
Excluding /System/Library/Caches: 25.1 MB (42 items)
Excluding /private/var/log: 27.1 MB (219 items)
Excluding /private/var/spool/cups: 8 KB (5 items)
Excluding /private/var/spool/fax: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /private/var/spool/uucp: 0 bytes (0 items)
Excluding /private/var/db/dyld: 536.9 MB (11 items)


I guess most of them are useless anyhow, so no biggie there.

For CCC, I am still reading more and more on it. It is more advanced than a simple DD like you mentioned, so I will read up more on it, it could be exactly what am looking for.
 
Worse, I cannot even use tar to make a compressed file out of [a TimeMachine Backup]

Since Time Machine use directory hard links, it is likely a bad idea to do much of anything inside its folder structure; even if the tar was successful, it's iffy whether untaring would result in something worthwhile.
 
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