backuptime-machine
I am running OS X Lion/10.7.4 and have set up a network disk hosted on an Ubuntu server using directions I found online. Time Machine recognizes the disk and backs up to it. However it backs up as sparsebundle "bands" files. I would like to be able to read the backed-up files from the Ubuntu server.
Is there any way to tell Time Machine to back up to regular files instead of using sparsebundle/bands files?
According to information from this page, the answer is no, it will not support encrypted Time Machine backups to network-attached storage. They're specifically mentioning Time Capsules and Airport Extremes. The issue Paul Eccles mentioned looks to be related to whether you can backup to NAS with Time Machine at all without regard to encryption status.
The link referenced also seems to indicate you can't use Time Machine encryption on direct-attached storage, but that may be because you can use Disk Utility to encrypted a direct-attached volume instead. Commenter Fracai calls out the classic standby of creating an encrypted disk image, storing that on network-attached storage, and mounting that for your Time Machine backups.
I'll also point out the discussion on that page (which is slightly inaccurate, but mostly on) wherein commenter TrumpetPower! cautions encrypting backups. This is a point worth repeating here. I'll rephrase (more precisely and accurately) what TrumpetPower! wrote:
If you encrypt a backup, you add complexity to a process designed to simplify and preserve access to your information. With complexity comes increased probability of failure. Thus, the chance that you lose access to your backed-up data goes up. Do yourself a favor and make sure you understand when and why you might wish to encrypt your backups and think hard about how you'll ensure you have access to your encryption key when it counts.
No, the backups will not be encrypted automatically, but it's very easy to enable for directly attached disks. Just check "Encrypt Backup Disk" in the Time Machine disk selection settings.
If you're backing up to another Mac, you can use Disk Utility on that Mac to erase non-boot drives and put an encrypted partition on them:
Best Answer
I found a github project a short time ago, which handles the "read the backed-up files" part of this question:
https://github.com/torarnv/sparsebundlefs
That is good enough for my purposes.