Knox + Time Machine

davidsnyder

I've been looking for quite some time for a dead simple way to encrypt my entire Time Machine drive and am wondering if Knox might be it with it's option to format and encrypt an entire drive.



Yes I know about alternatives, but I actually like Time Machine; I use TM Editor to set my backups to only run once a day. My Mac's are secure enough for my liking, but it's always bugged me to think that if a thief took my equipment while they may not easily access my data on my computers, they could quite easily access anything they like on my backup drives.



Can anyone speak to the benefits or problems with doing this with Knox?

MartyS

We don't have enough experience with encrypting an entire drive using Knox to know if there are "issues", performance or otherwise, of doing this with your Time Machine destination. We'd love to hear from any Knox customers that have tried this to hear their experiences: both good or not so good.

echristensen

I don't believe it will work this way. I was hoping to do the same thing because I want to secure my time machine backups. Unfortunately it appears that when you encrypt a disk Knox will just put a copy of itself on the disk along with an expanding image file. When you then select the disk with Time Machine you will have the time machine DB sitting on the disk next to the Knox image. What we really want is for the Time Machine DB to be inside the image file, encrypted.



You can see this for yourself by mounting the drive when Knox is not running. The only thing that Knox does (apparently) is conceal the actual mount point of the disk and then mount its own image file to the same mount point. It's a shame, because the ability to encrypt Time Machine backups would be a great feature IMO.

MartyS

Thanks for the update, and welcome to the forums, echristensen! As I said, we're still learning some of the ins and outs of what works and doesn't work and we appreciate any experiences that our customers provide to that knowledge base.

Guido

Would be better to hear that you're working on it.

Would make KNOX extreme valuable, not only for me but...

MartyS

[quote name='Guido']Would be better to hear that you're working on it.

Would make KNOX extreme valuable, not only for me but...[/QUOTE]



Thank you for your note of encouragement. As we hear more from our customers about what they'd like to see in Knox that helps us make decisions about what to work on when the time comes. Right now we're just going to be smoothing off any rough edges we see so that everyone gets a great experience with what's already there... *then* we'll look into bigger things.