I see that Lion offers the option of encrypting TIme Machine backup volumes, which seems like a Good Thing. After reading up a bit on this, it seems clear that it will handle the situation where the backup volume is physically attached to the machine being backed up. However, I've gotten mixed signals about whether this will work with networked clients. I have a server with a TM volume, and a number of machines on my network use that server and its disk for TM backups. Can I encrypt the TM volume in this situation, and will Time Machine be able to back up from those clients to the server? I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work, but, like I said, the overall story isn't completely clear. Thanks for any advice!
MacOS – Do encrypted Time Machine backups work across a network
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Related Solutions
It took me a little while to find the "Encrypt backup disk" checkbox, so I thought an answer explaining that may save you some time.
Press the "Select Disk…" button in the Time Machine System Preferences panel, and the "Encrypt backup disk" checkbox is enabled when you select a disk.
I decided not to encrypt my Drobo after reading Alrescha's important note about not being able to use an encrypted disk with older versions of OS X than Lion.
But I was curious to see if Apple would warn me:
(See also "If I encrypt a Time Machine backup disk, is the entire disk encrypted or just the Backups.backupdb directory?".)
You can try mounting that volume and then use the tmutil command to tell Time Machine where do you want backups to go to. Just make sure that nobody else is using the sparsebundle from the network
Stepwise:
- Mount the
.sparsebundledisk image - Open Terminal
In the Terminal command line, type:
sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/{mounted-disk-image}Be sure to replace
{mounted-disk-image}above to the drive's mount point name.- Open the Time Machine menu and force-start a backup.
Watch the contents of the Backups.backupdb folder in the disk image as Time Machine runs and ensure that it is creating your new backup set.
Note that you'll need Lion for this. Enter the command man tmutil in the Terminal for more information.
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Best Answer
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.