Time Machine encryption

[ashleykaryl]

I have just enabled FileVault 2 on my main drive running Lion and that seemed to go very smoothly, so I figured I could enable encryption on the external drive that is shared by Time Machine and SuperDuper!. This process is taking forever and has now been running for about 24 hours but I expect it to finish in the next 8-10 hours.

When SuperDuper! tried to run earlier it crawled along and I eventually stopped the backup, so presumably this is related to the ongoing encryption process of that external drive. When this is finished and I make backups in future with SuperDuper! will they now be encrypted along with those for Time Machine and is there any problem with doing this?

[dnanian]

If you encrypt the destination, and use Smart Update, it'll be encrypted. But at the file level, the files don't look encrypted to SuperDuper (if you understand what I mean).

[ashleykaryl]

Originally Posted by dnanian

If you encrypt the destination, and use Smart Update, it'll be encrypted. But at the file level, the files don't look encrypted to SuperDuper (if you understand what I mean).

OK that doesn't sound like any kind of problem and I always use Smart Update anyway. I gather that following this initial encryption process subsequent backups will not be slowed down at all either.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is that a couple years ago I had an external Maxtor die on me without the slightest warning and that was the drive used for Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups. The drive was still under warranty and Maxtor said they would replace it but I was far from happy about sending in the drive like that, especially since it was before I started using 1Password. Perhaps I was being paranoid but enabling file encryption on the external drive sounds like a positive security step if it doesn't cause problems with SuperDuper!

[dnanian]

No, that's not true. All I/O is slowed down by encryption...and encryption does make it much harder to recover data from a drive, since it's all unreadable. But that's sort of the point.

[ashleykaryl]

Originally Posted by dnanian

No, that's not true. All I/O is slowed down by encryption...and encryption does make it much harder to recover data from a drive, since it's all unreadable. But that's sort of the point.

Sure that's understood. The important thing though is that encrypted backups won't present any kind of problem if needed by the admin user for restoring data in Lion using SuperDuper! or Time Machine and it seems there is no problem in this respect.

In the past I tried the old FileVault and it dragged my old computer to a virtual standstill so it wasn't very practical but the new version seems to be a big improvement and I haven't noticed any kind of perceptible slow down at all, though this on an 8 Core Mac Pro with 32 gigs of ram. I keep images and videos stored on separate internal drives that aren't encrypted so perhaps that also helps. The external drive is only FireWire 400 and encrypted so time will tell how much backup speed is affected...