After finding that even the upgraded version of Mac OS X’s FileVault hard disk encryption was incompatible with its Time Machine backup, I finally dumped it today. In the last six months, it’s given my MacBook multiple aneurysms, forced me to buy an external drive to provide temporary space while recovering it, and sent me scrambling to resurrect my files.
What I finally realized is that the only things I needed to encrypt were tax returns and credit reports with whole or partial social security numbers. I included the partial ones, because even though most credit agencies only display the last 4 digits, many of the accounts use the same number and display everything but the last 4. A good way to hunt down these files is to search file contents for the first 5 and last 4 digits, with and without dashes.
These files are easily stored in a smaller encrypted disk image created using Disk Utility, and by creating it as a sparsebundle, it’ll grow and shrink as needed. When TrueCrypt offers a Mac version, I’ll probably switch to it so the files are also directly accessible from non-Mac backup machines.
