Encrypting/protecting Time Machine backup drive?
How do you guys secure/protect your Time Machine backup drive? Even though it's an external drive, it's still susceptible to physical theft though. What do you guys do for precautions?
With OS X 10.7 Lion you now have the option of encrypted Time Machine backups.
You can have backup to an encrypted sparse bundle (the format that time machine backsup to). You can have the sparse bundle automatically mounted on any computer that has the encryption key stored in the keychain.
The basic procedure to enable encrypted backups is:
Disable TimeMachine.
Create an encrypted sparsebundle with the same name as what TimeMachine is already looking for.
- Copy the contents of your old sparse bundle into the new one.
- Replace the old one with the new one.
- Re-enable TimeMachine.
Here is a guide that goes more in depth: http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2010/05/encrypted_time_machine_backups