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Old 02-14-2006, 09:56 AM
onlynone onlynone is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 3
Backing up filevaults quickly

I use the filevault for my user account. Based on the suggestions in the user manual I logged out of that user before I do backups. I use the smart update, and everything works fine except that it takes over an hour to move the sparse image for my user account. Obviously even a small change in my home directory for that user would require the entire sparse image to be copied over.

There's no way around the long backup time the very first time, but it would be nice if after the first backup is done, you could designate certain files as sparse images which would be handled separately from the rest of the drive. After copying of all the other files is finished, each pair of sparse images (one on the source drive, and one on the target) are mounted, and a backup is then done from the source sparse image to the backup sparse image. That way, if only one file has change in my filevault, it would take just seconds to make the update. I believe root can mount and modify any filevault, right? If not, there could be an option to save the password of any encrypted sparse images you want treated in this way.

I've got a 37GB filevault/sparse image, It would make back ups a good deal faster for me.

(oh, and even though the user manual says that only firewire devices can be made bootable, I was able to boot off of the backup made to my external usb hard drive, don't know if anyone else has hit on this.)
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