Does Lion damage original filevault sparse bundle passwords?

I upgraded my MBP to Lion 4 months ago. I have the home directory of one of the acounts protected with the original filevault from earlier versions of OS X. It worked fine in lion, until... I 'tried' to give the account a new password. Lion complained that I can't change the password on an account with filevault and told me to turn it off before changing the password. I shrugged it off and figured I'd do it when I had time. (It takes a LONG time.) I used the MBP for the rest of the day allowing it to sleep and requiring me to type in the account password to continue working. No problems. I then turned the power completely off on the MBP to travel. When I turned it on the next day, I couldn't fully log into my acount. It would recognize my original password and start to mount the home directory, but it said that I needed to type in the original password for that filevault protected area! I do, but it will not work! What did Lion change? I have another admin account on the MBP and tried to mount the home directory sparse bundle from that account and the original password will not work from that user account either.
Has anyone else run into this? I'm wondering how I'll get Lion open that thing.
Condo

This is really severe!
I have removed the file and pointed symlink to null device - this prevents writing anything to the file (at the cost of losing other security related information from this log file).
In case anybody wanted to do the same here's what you need to paste to the Terminal.app:
f=/var/log/secure.log && sudo rm $f && sudo ln -s /dev/null $f
and type your password.
(not sure, but sudo only works if you have password set and you're on an admin account)

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Best approach for Time Machine / Entourage / FileVault / sparse bundle disk

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6. Perhaps there is another way to get the disk images backed up at logout other than using Time Machine.
So my questions are:
A. What is the best overall approach to providing a low-maintenance reliable backup which deals appropriately with Entourage and provides a small amount of encrypted space?
B. Can Time Machine be made to backup disk images other than FileVault disk images at logout? (for example is there a particular location / filename format for FileVault images which I could emulate with the other disk images to fool Time Machine into backing them up?)
C. When Time Machine runs at logout, have MS Entourage and the daemon process already been shut down and the disks unmounted, to prevent corruption?
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C. Is this all going to get magically fixed in Snow Leopard?
D. Will MS come up with a sensible storage format for Entourage?
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I don't know if there is a complete solution, but here are some things you could consider.
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2. You can change the backup period using third-party utilities like TimeMachineEditor - VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
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Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
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Thanks. That didn't seem to work for me, but this did in Terminal:
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defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool NO
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Does the TM create a sparse bundle on a Raid 5 device with a local thunderbolt connection

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Time Capsule promts for sparse bundle password when trying to restore backup to clean MacBook

Hi,
My five month old MacBook Pro 15" suffered from a "smart" HD failure. I got it serviced and it came back with a new HD, a fresh OS and a new, clean user.
When trying to restore my backup from my Time Capsule, I get asked to provide the password for machinename.sparsebundle. I have not set such a password. I have tried both my Time Capsule password and my username & corrensponding password but neither is accepted.
Additional details:
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Time Capsule password is fine, I can log in on a general basis.
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I have tried restoring both over wifi and via ethernet cable.
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Thanks,
Steve

Thank you for taking the time replying to my question.
     "That should be the password for the user you had originally on the Mac."
I use the password for the user I have originally on my MBP (on the backup).
     "But you should not restore a version earlier than the one used now."
Not sure what you mean here. The OSX-version is the same on both my backup and my MBP.
     "If you want to completely migrate it should be better to boot for install disk.
     See info here. http://pondini.org/TM/14.html
     Pondini covers restore by various methods in Q14-17.. there is a lot of useful info."
Thank you for the link. I have gone through Q14-17 but it does not cover my problem; I get asked for a password for the sparsebundle file. (I do not have a install disk though. Any workarounds for this?)
Even when I try to verify the sparsebundle in First Aid in Disk Utility (http://pondini.org/TM/A5b.html) I get asked for the password for the sparsebundle.
Is this not a known problem?
BR,
Steve

HT4413 what is a macbook pro.sparse bundle password?

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. . . sparse bundle could not be accessed (error -1)

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then changed the version number to 1.0.1
uploaded this apk
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Most likely culprit is your Lacie drives which are notorious for flaky power supplies which cause just the sort of erratic behaviour that you describe. Have had similar issues myself. Lacie has been good about replacing my power converter-- twice. If you have seven of them, good luck finding the bad one or more. Like I said, the behaviour is erratic. Sometimes it'll work sometimes not. I can't comment on Samsung drives because I've never used them and have never heard anything about them. Same with Softraid. Why not just use Disk Utility. Sounds like you're ready for an external hardware raid. This will be much faster, much more reliable, and may even be cheaper than seven firewire drives. Check out G Tech, and Maxx Digital for starters.
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madhusudhan wrote:
Thanks for response V.K
Not sure what you mean what sparsebundle?
I want to know what sparse bundle you are talking about.
the sparse bundle with your filevaulted home directory which was originally located in /users/yourusername? or some other sparse bundle?
I was using FileVault. Probably I may have put the trailing slash (can't remember as it was almost two weeks back).
The External HDD is FAT formatted drive. I haven't done any changes to permissions.
you should not be using a FAT drive for this. move everything over to an HFS+ formatted drive. and don't use a FAT drive for backing up OS X. FAT is an old file system which does not support many features needed by OS X.
so what you need to do is put all the stuff you listed (token, Info.plist, Info.bckup and the bands folder) into a folder and give that folder the name username.sparsebundle where username is your old username. then you need to add a bundle flag to that folder. you need setFile command for that. it's not a part of the basix OS X install. you can install XCode (it's on the SL install DVD) or use Pacifist http://www.charlessoft.com/ to install just the setFile command. then run the command
setFile -a -B /path/to/unsername.sparsebundle
This will restore the bundle bit to it and it will look like an actual sparse bundle. you can then try mounting it by double-clicking it. you'll have to enter your old user password. if it works you are in luck and can reuse it. if it doesn't work it's most likely corrupt beyond repair and you should trash it. you can try fixing it first but it's almost never possible with corrupt encrypted sparse bundles. but try mounting it first and see if it simply mounts. post back with the results.
Advance thanks for assistance.

Why is the sparse bundle so much smaller than the backed up computer...can I be confident all files are backed up?

Hey gang,
iphoto folder became big so I have moved it to an external drive. I made sure the external disk is not excluded from timemachine backup in tm preferences. Backup seemed to take forever (it actually said "preparing for backup" the whole time with a spinning progress bar) ie 24 hours and still the same pogress bar.
i stopped the process as i had no confidence anything was actually happening
When i open up time machine, an earlier version of my imac is there, but the external drive is kind of greyed and i cannot access it.
When I check the sparse bundle size, it is under 200 gb, when my imac is around 600 gb, 900 with the external drive.
Why is the sparse bundle so small relative to the imac? are there hidden data files outside of the sparse bundle? when checking the preferences, it states total included is 921 gb...yet that is not reflected in the sparse bundle size.
I want to be sure iphoto is actually backed up before deleting it from my imac.
thanks anyone!

marten berkman wrote:
I am wondering whether the "processing" progress bar was due to the time capsule freeing up space for the additional data on the new external drive. When I cancelled it, available space on the tc incresed from 200 to 500 gb.
Yes, quite possibly. Especially on Leopard and Snow Leopard, that process on network backups is excruciatingly repetitive and slow. It's improved greatly in Lion and later, but still isn't exactly quick.
The backup complete, i checked the contents of the backed up version of the external drive, and the iphoto folder was the same size as original, so I have confidence that iphoto is backed up. Now I could delete the iphoto from the imac, freeing up tons of space.
Yay!
Still curious why the imac sparsebundle is only 160gb, while my macbook pro sparsebundle is about 700 gb...as though they are inversely named from the computers they back up.
Oh, I didn't realize you had two Macs backing-up to the TC. Which one is the external HD connected to?
Unless you've specifically excluded things, after the initial backup, the sparse bundle should be nearly the size of the data it's backing-up (TM does exclude some things like system work files, most caches and logs, and trash, so the backups are a few GBs smaller). As you do more backups, of course, it will grow.
So please clarify how much data is on each drive, Mac, and sparse bundle.
Also, the 2tb time capsule has 258 gb of 1.8 tb available....am I to suppose that there is hidden backup data not in the sparse bundles?
Sparse bundles are odd critters. They don't automatically shrink when things are deleted from them. Instead, the vacated space is used for new files until it's full, then it begins to grow again. Time Machine will "compact" them when necessary, to reclaim the empty space, but doesn't take the time to do it unless it's out of room.
You can do that manually if you want, per the pink box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12.
Message was edited by: Pondini

Does Lion damage original filevault sparse bundle passwords?

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