Backup and Restore Questions.

Roger Ramjet

I've been going through the forums and one thing I picked up that I was doing wrong, was that I had not excluded my Knox vaults from Time Machine backups. I fixed that, and fortunately nothing seems to be corrupted. I also use Backblaze for cloud backup and I had excluded that. I just want to make sure I understand this correctly: that the reason for this is the vaults should not be open during a backup, however it IS ok to backup the Knox vault backups to Time Machine, Backblaze, Amazon S3 or where ever. Right so far? What happens in the event that a Time Machine backup starts up or is running when Knox does a backup? Will the Knox vault and/or its backup get corrupted?



Now, before I go all in with Knox, I have a restore question. So I have my Knox Vault backups, backup themselves to Amazon S3 and/or Backblaze; my house burns down and destroys my computer; the nice insurance man pays for a new Mac; I install Knox; can I access/restore these backups even though they weren't created with my new Computer? If so, how; by simply doing a manual restore?

I just want to make sure, that in a worst case scenario I can still access my stuff.

MikeT

Hi Roger,



You got everything correct. In order to keep a consistent valid backup copies of your vaults, the vaults need to be closed. The reason is that the vaults are not really a simple file on the hard drive, they are very complicated with hundreds if not thousands of pieces and a simple 2kb file change inside the vault can result into a 8-16mb change to the vault file itself.



Not to mention if you use encryption, each piece is filled with what appears to be random data and without all the pieces, none of the data makes sense. When it is closed, no changes occur and the vault file itself is static. If it is open, the vault file is dynamically changing all the time and saving a backup of that can result in a corrupted file because it never had a chance to save ALL pieces of the vault.



Time Machine and remote backup tools like BackBlaze can backup your backups folder but not the active Knox folder because they do not know when those vaults are open, therefore the active Knox folder needs to be excluded from the backups. The backup folders are full of static vault files, so no changes are made at any point except the creation of the backups.



When you restore the files back to your new Mac, you can double click on the vaults to open it on the Mac even without Knox installed. In fact, you can move those files to any random Mac (as long as they're running 10.4 or later) and they'll work on it as well. Knox uses the built-in technologies from the Mac OS X to create the vaults and to encrypt/decrypt the files.



I hope this helps, please let me know if you have more questions.