Comments on: First Impressions: Apple Time Capsule

By: David

David — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:58:07 +0000

The previous posters are wrong about how FileVault work. There seems to be this common misconception on the net that you need to log in as a different user and back up an entire FileVault user partition at once; this is out of date. For a FileVault parition CREATED UNDER LEOPARD none of this is true; the data is kept in sparse banded encryption set. You can back it up from within the user account while logged in, and yes you can do it using Time Machine; despite a warning dialog when you set it up, it works perfectly. It is fast and gets only the changes. The backup is encrypted and can be accessed on another Mac by providing your home (encryption) password. The backup can not be accessed through the Time Machine UI; it shows up as a normal disk partition though and you can drag files from it to your home dir as needed to recover. FileVault partitions created before Leopard behave differently; if you have one, you should re-create it under Leopard and copy the data into it to make it a sparse-banded backup.

I would really like to know whether Time Capsule and File Vault play well together. I have a feeling I'm going to have to buy it to find out though because, somewhat dismayingly, everyone out there seems to not understand how their FileVault works (but posts incorrect info anyway). I run the above setup every day and I have verified all functionality described.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:02:14 +0000

I've seen the FileVault complaint before and I think it is more of a condemnation of FileVault than Time Machine. There are other ways to encrypt sensitive data and no reasonable way to backup FileVault, do to it's very nature (except for nightly clone backups).

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:45:22 +0000

The biggest problem I see with Time Capsule (and Time Machine) is that it really doesn't work with FileVault encrypted user accounts. Anyone with a Mac portable who uses FileVault (and IMHO anyone with a laptop should use FileVault in case the computer is lost or stolen) is out of luck for back ups. The only way to do it is log out, log in as another user, and back up the entire encrypted user directory as one massive file. Not practical, and so much for Apple's famed "it just works."

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:11:55 +0000

Your Ethernet backup time seems slow to me. I backed up 42GB from my MacBook via Ethernet in under 2.5 ours. I backed up 160GB from my iMac in less than 8 hours.

Did you have AirPort ON during the backup? I did that initially and found TM was using the AP connection instead of Ethernet. I had to kill the backup, turn AP OFF, and then start a new backup to ensure the Ethernet connection was used.