Encrypted time machine backup freezes OS X

Been having fairly regular problems with Time Machine backup to a LaCie 5Big 10TB Thunderbolt drive where OS X 10.8.5 will completely freeze during a backup.
I've formatted 2 of the 5 drives as 2TB Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) in order to perform alternate encrypted Time Machine backups. The other 3 are part of a striped 6TB logical drive. I connect the backup drives about once a week for the past few months and have encountered a freeze during backup a few times. I currently have a situation where merely attempting to mount one of the Time Machine volumes causes OS X to freeze. Initially the mouse cursor starts to stutter as it is moved around the screen and then it completely freezes. No mouse cursor, no clock, nothing. Have left for a couple of hours and still nothing so have to reboot. There are absolutely no messages in the console for the time of the hang e.g. time of most recent hang 12:55 PM which is when I attempted to mount the drive. Most recent message before the restart 12:49:16 PM.
The thing is, sometimes the backups work fine for weeks at a time, other times I get these freezes with the same symptoms as above and the only thing that seems to work is reformatting the volume and starting again, although this can take a few attempts to work. I've run a verify disk and currently everything currently seems OK (although can't run for the backup volume as it won't mount, and I've previously had to restore the boot disk due to Disk Verify failing on the boot disk).
Has anyone got suggestions as to what could be causing this? Options are faulty LaCie 5Big, Time Machine encrypted option, OS X bugs or file corruptions.

Unfortunately the 5Big only has Thunderbolt connections and I only have the cable it came with as it is my only Thunderbolt device.
The secure erase single pass of the disk failed with the following error:
Secure Disk Erase failed with the error: Securely erasing data to prevent recovery failed.
In the console logs there was the message: Kernel: disk5s2: data underrun
I ran another erase but without the secure option and immediately got the error:
Disk Erase failed with the error:
Unable to write to the last block of the device
and in console:
Kernel: disk5: data underrun
Going to give it another go as I'm not sure if this is as symptom or a cause as I've recently had similar errors on the boot disk (internal SSD) and "Disk0s2 I/O error" occurring in the console. I had to restore the system from backup to resolve that particular issue.

Similar Messages

Do encrypted Time Machine backups work across a network?

I see that Lion offers the option of encrypting TIme Machine backup volumes, which seems like a Good Thing. After reading up a bit on this, it seems clear that it will handle the situation where the backup volume is physically attached to the machine being backed up. However, I've gotten mixed signals about whether this will work with networked clients. I have a server with a TM volume, and a number of machines on my network use that server and its disk for TM backups. Can I encrypt the TM volume in this situation, and will Time Machine be able to back up from those clients to the server? I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work, but, like I said, the overall story isn't completely clear. Thanks for any advice!

There's nothing in the Help or other documentation I can find.
Just that OSX can't do it from the Mac that's doing the backup.
There was a similar post the other day; I asked the poster to let us know whether it worked, but haven't gotten an answer yet. So if you try it, please post back with your results.
I do agree with coocoo, though -- if you want to do this, keep "secondary" backups, not encrypted, just in case. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions.

Restore encrypted Time Machine backup: password failure

hi,
I upgraded my mid 09 MBP with an SDD and created a Fusion Drive maintaining my HDD in the optical bay. After rebooting and wanting to restore from a Time Machine Backup, I'm prompted with a password request of the disk image, being the password I used to encrypt the TM when creating it.
No matter how I enter the password, it says it's not correct and I can't proceed.
Finally I created in a fresh setup of Mavericks. Once I'm in my Mac, When going to Time Machine, I see my Time Capsule drive on the network, and entering the encryption password, I can indeed access my Sparse Bundle.
I have to say that my password contains a space at the end of the password (it slipped in by copying the password by accident) and I think it might be the reason it's not accepting it as the valid password when in recovery/setup mode.. Either way, I've tried the password with and without the space so...
In Disk Utility, I've had the disk listed but the change password feature is disabled..
I've looked thru different forums, but no luck so far.
Anyone who has had the same issue or has a clue on how to either change the encryption password or how to install the full backup I have in my sparse bundle, it would be highly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

Hello:
This thread seems to answer your question:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/12949561#12949561
Barry

Encrypted Time Machine Backups on a shared drive

Hello community,
the following situation:
I have an iMac and a MacBook Air, both running Mountain Lion.
Both use FileVault 2 encryption of the whole MacOS partition.
The iMac is connected to an external USB hard drive, which I use as Time Machine volume. I've set up Time Machine to encrypt the backups on the external volume (it took abou 2 days until the whole drive was encrypted).
So far no problems. No let's get to the tricky part.
I want to the MacBook to use the same USB drive for its Time Machine backups. However I don't want to connect the volume directly via USB. Instead I have shared the USB volume on the iMac. And now I want to use this shared drive as my backup drive in the MacBook. (Hint: I want to use the same partition both for the iMac backups as well as for the MacBook backups.)
I can mount and select the drive on the MacBook. However Time Machine on the MacBook asks me, if I want to envrypt the backups. Which of course I want to do. But the USB drive and therefore the entire mounted volume is already encrypted (from the iMac).
Now I'm scared to opt in for encryption on the MacBook because I'm afraid the MacBook will again encypt the whole volume. Will that be the case? If so, what will happen on the iMac afterwards? Or will Time Machine recognize, that the volume is already encrypted (encryption passwords are the same of course)?
Or is it not necessary to activate backup encryption on the MacBook since the drive is already encryted? Or will the MacBook somehow manage to write unencrypted backups on an encrypted volume?
I would really appreciate any help to get the backups up and running. In short: I want both Macs to backup to the same drive. And I want both to encrypt the backups (with the same password).
Regards

meistermilchreis wrote:
(Hint: I want to use the same partition both for the iMac backups as well as for the MacBook backups.)
That's usually not a good idea; for best results, they should be in separate partitions. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #4 for an explanation, and #22 for setup instructions.
I can mount and select the drive on the MacBook. However Time Machine on the MacBook asks me, if I want to envrypt the backups. Which of course I want to do. But the USB drive and therefore the entire mounted volume is already encrypted (from the iMac).
Backups made over a network are placed in a sparse bundle disk image, separate from the backups made directly. The disk image is like a disk-within-a-disk; it has it's own partition map scheme and format. So it will not be encrypted unless you tell TM to do so.
In short: I want both Macs to backup to the same drive. And I want both to encrypt the backups (with the same password).
Since the backups are separate, they must be encrypted separately. You may use the same password for both if you want.

Entering password for an encrypted time machine backup

During a recent hard disk failure. I have had to restore my system from a time machine backup.
I keep this backup on an encrytped external drive.
I booted into recovery mode, erased the drive to fix the hard disk errors (it wasn't repairable).
Then I tried to mount the encrypted drive for recovery.
Everytime I entered the password, a 50 character string with all character types it failed to unlock.
I tried the disk on another mac and it unlocked fine.
Then I noticed that the recovery mode defaults to US Input Source and I have a UK macbook (2007).
So I changed the input source to British.
Still the password doesn't work.
Then I noticed that once you click unlock the password entry box defaults to US again and doesn't let you change it.
Fortunately UK keyboard isn't very different to US and I figured out that the only difference was to use Shift 3 for # rather than option 3 that we normally use on the UK keyboard.
Is there a work around this? Is it a known issue.
Glad I don't have an arabic or russian keyboard :-)

File a bug report with Apple.

Time machine backup freezes on initial backup attempt - any ideas?

I just purchased a Seagate 3 TB USB 2.0/3.0 external drive to use as my time machine backup drive. I have a MacBook Pro that was purchased about 3-4 years ago. The MacBook Pro has a 120 GB hard drive and is currently running MAC OSx 10.6.8. I also have another WD 1 TB FireWire external drive that I use to store all of my media files.
After I followed the instructions for installing the new Seagate drive for use with the MAC OSx, I initiated a time machine backup. It very quickly determined that it needed to back up almost 900,000 files totaling just about 400 GB. It started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. In a little less than an hour it reach 53 GB and remained there for an additional two hours before I decided to stop the backup.
Once I got the backup stopped, I deleted the backup and decided to look at my energy saving settings. I noticed that the "Put drives to sleep whenever possible" check box was checked, so I unchecked that option and restarted the MAC. I then initiated the time machine backup again. Like the first time it quickly determined that it needed to backup the same amount of data as before and started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. Before going to bed at around 11 PM last night it was at about 60 GB so I thought I was out of the woods (having gotten further than the 53 GB earlier). When I woke up this morning at 5:30 AM it was sitting at 69 GB.
I am really frustrated at this point and don't know why the time machine back up would be failing on a brand new hard drive. Does anyone have any ideas?
PS - I was previously using a Seagate 1.5 TB USB drive as my time machine backup and never had any issues with it. I decided to use the 1.5 TB drive for a different purpose, which is why I have the new 3 TB drive to use as a backup. And I still have the full backup on the 1.5 TB drive just in case anything were to go awry.

Your best bet is probably to deal with the kernel panics first; whatever's causing that may be part or all of the cause of the other problem.
They are usually caused by hardware problems, but can be software, especially kernel extensions.
Start by running this: Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test. Run the Extended tests(that may take an hour or so, depending on how much RAM you have). Write down any error code(s) it shows.
If that doesn't show a problem, see this Apple article: If “You need to restart your computer” appears
If that doesn't help, post a new thread about the kernel panics, with as much detail about what's running (or not running) at the time, etc.

Encrypted Time Machine Backup on a Network Drive?

Hi
I have a server (Mac Mini) in my LAN that I'd like the various Macs to be able to use it as the backup location, but I'd like the backups to be stored in an encrypted state.
Any way I can do that?
If not with the standard OS X options, perhaps with some clever combination of other tools? (e.g. use encfs to trick OS X into thinking that the TM destination is normal whereas it's actually encrypted)
I tried a few things but no luck so far - would love to hear from someone how actually figured this out and has such a setup actually working.
Thanks!

meistermilchreis wrote:
(Hint: I want to use the same partition both for the iMac backups as well as for the MacBook backups.)
That's usually not a good idea; for best results, they should be in separate partitions. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #4 for an explanation, and #22 for setup instructions.
I can mount and select the drive on the MacBook. However Time Machine on the MacBook asks me, if I want to envrypt the backups. Which of course I want to do. But the USB drive and therefore the entire mounted volume is already encrypted (from the iMac).
Backups made over a network are placed in a sparse bundle disk image, separate from the backups made directly. The disk image is like a disk-within-a-disk; it has it's own partition map scheme and format. So it will not be encrypted unless you tell TM to do so.
In short: I want both Macs to backup to the same drive. And I want both to encrypt the backups (with the same password).
Since the backups are separate, they must be encrypted separately. You may use the same password for both if you want.

Encrypted Time Machine Backup Lost in Mountain Lion Install?

Hi,
Operating 10.7.4, I make use of 'time machine' encrypted backups to an external HD. If I wipe the HD and do a fresh install of 10.8, will I lose the encrypted backup? Of course I know my passwrd and I don't rely on the keyring, but if there is some certificate exchange between OS and TM, there is a possibility that installing a fresh OS, I will lose access to the disk? Is there any official documentation that addresses this concern?
Thanks, cheers.

vance.corkery wrote:
Hi,
Operating 10.7.4, I make use of 'time machine' encrypted backups to an external HD. If I wipe the HD and do a fresh install of 10.8, will I lose the encrypted backup?
No. It's password only. You can even access it on a different Mac (Lion or ML) with the password.

Time machine backup freezing up

I had my time capsule full last month so my two computers kept getting an error when trying to do its scheduled backup. I went on and deleted one of my backup images to make enough room for one computer to use the hard drive. Then for computer one I plugged in a second hard hard and it backed up with no problem.
Computer two is still set to backup wirelessly to the time capsule but every time I click the option to "backup now" is sits/freezes in the beginning phase "Making backup disk available". Looking at the available space I have : 313.92 gigs of 497.96 gigs free. At this point I have left the computer on for hours, also there is no canceling this process, I can't even do a hard quit; I have to hold the power button to turn off computer.

Nobie381 wrote:
Computer two is still set to backup wirelessly to the time capsule but every time I click the option to "backup now" is sits/freezes in the beginning phase "Making backup disk available".
Try a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in [Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Airport.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).

Why won't my encrypted time machine backup mount?

I'm using Time Machine to back up to an external usb drive. I formatted the drive as guid partition table and checked the encryption box when setting up Time Machine. After the initial backup Time Machine won't perform is backup schedule unless I mount the drive manually. It seems to unmount the drive everytime I log out and it just won't mount again.
Thanks for any suggestions!

Learn Time Machine - it is a total backup system and you have to use the TM program to access backups - see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US for instructions - you do not directly acces sthe TM backup - you use TM to access it
There is a Time Machine forum for TM questions
LN

Can't encrypt time machine backup

Told I have a "non-GPT partition scheme" I've never heard of "GPT"- disk utility says I have Apple partition map.

This operation will remove all data on the drive. Don't erase your only backup.
Select the icon of the drive you want to partition—not any of the volume icons below it—in the Disk Utility window. Select the Partition tab.
From the Partition Layout menu in the window, select One Partition.
From the Format menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Click the Options button and select GUID Partition Table.
Click the Apply button and confirm when prompted.

HT1338 Error preparing Time Machine backup disc- size error usually not being multiples of 512, encryption

Trying to encrypt Time Machine backup disc getting message - Error preparing Time Machine backup disc- size error usually not being multiples of 512, encryption.

I got the same problem.
But I think it cannot be related to not being a multiple of 512.
As when I devide the number of bytes 3.000.592.982.016 by 512 is equals 5860533168.
3.000.592.982.016 / 512 = 5860533168.
So what could be the real problem?
With kind Regards

Encrypted Time Machine and Other Files

Hello. Is it possible to store other files on an encrypted Time Machine backup drive? I'm trying to find a place to store files such as raw images etc that I don't want to store on my MacBook but want to store on an external drive. I'm trying to avoid the need to purchase another hard drive as there is plenty of space available on the external drive I use for my Time Machine backups.
The external drive cannot be paritioned to accomplish this as Time Machine encryption only works if the drive has a single partion.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16037914#16037914

A backup strategy is one of individual choice. By having more than on HDD for your data, you are distributing the risk
I have 5 external HDDs. One is dedicated to Time Machine, the others have data that simply takes up too much room on the internal drive in the MBP (mostly video). Some of the data that I have on these HDDs is redundant copies of what I have on the MBP and in Time Machine. This is data that is important to me. This may seem excessive but I would argue not.
Ex: my iTunes is on the internal HHD, Time Machine and also on my secondary MBP (and the iPod). That for me is important an I do not want to lose it.
I have seen too many instances on this forum where individuals have lost data without adequate backups looking for answers on how to retrieve that information only to be disappointed. Please don't let that happen to you. Given enough time, ALL HDDs will fail!
Ciao.

How can I tell if my Time Machine backups are encrypted?

Hi - I would really appreciate it if someone could help me find out if my Time Machine backps are actually encrypted.
I know that there is an 'encryption' option when choosing a disc for Time Machine to backup to, but the problem is I cannot remember whether or not I actually ticked it (as it was a couple of years ago).
Other info that might be helpful:
- The disk I use Time Machine to backup to is actually a Apple Time Capsule
- I do have FileVault2 enabled on my mac
- I have never encrypted the Time Capsule disc itself (via Disk Utility or anything similar)
- One possible clue might be: When I go into Time Machine preferences, and click on 'Select Disk...' (as if to choose another disk to back up to), and select the disc that Time Machine currently backs up to (i.e. the Time Capsule disc), it does show an 'Encrypt backups' checkbox at the bottom of the window... however this checkbox is unchecked and also greyed out.
Thanks in advance
a_quinn

a_quinn wrote:
- Because I originally created this Time Machine Backup (to the Time Capsule) back in my 'OS X Lion' days,
I wondered; you posted in the Mountain Lion forum, but your profile still says Lion.
that means that my backups now (and moving forward) will continue to be un-encrypted
Correct (as of now, anyway). You cannot encrypt existing network backups. I doubt that will be available in the future, and would take forever.
- The only way to encyrpt my backups now, moving forward, is to remove this Time Capsule disc (from Time Machine Preferences), and start all over again ensuring that I check the checkbox next to 'Encrypt Backup' when selecting the Time Capsule's disc to backup to.
Well, in theory it's possible, but would take forever, squared.
You could archive the TC's contents to a USB drive connected to it, per #Q6 in Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule).
Then delete the original, start a backup with encryption, and as soon as the encrypted sparse bundle is created, cancel the backup.
Mount the sparse bundle, open the disk image, and delete the Backups.backupdb folder inside it.
Connect the USB drive to your Mac, mount that sparse bundle, open its disk image, and copy the Backups.backupdb folder to the one on the TC.
Depending on how large the sparse bundle is, that could easily take a couple of days, at least, even connected via Ethernet.
Just for testing one day, I encrypted a very small set of existing test backups on a F/W 800 drive - 6 dated backups using a whole 12 GB. Took an hour.
An alternative would be, just do the "archive" and keep the USB drive "on the shelf" for a while. You can always connect it to your Mac and access those backups via the Browse Other Backup Disks option.
Trying to keep a couple of years worth of backups usually isn't a good idea. It's a very complex structure, so the odds of damage increase, it takes much longer to populate the TM browser, and it works slower and slower, and if you didn't need something for 6 months, are you really going to need it in 2 years?

What happens if you Time-Machine backup an encrypted file-vault HD?

This is related to my previous post - but deserves special mention for those people who are using time-vault AND Time-Machine.
My question is this: If the backup of my Hard-drive is encrypted, and I then reinstall from backup, what will this situation likely produce?
This is what I have done. I also Archived and installed my Mac prior to installing from my Time-Machine backup.
I now have an error message that displays the following message at the login screen:
"Unable to log into the file-vault account "......." at this time. An error has occurred."
My password IS CORRECT. I have not changed it, and the log in window does accept my password, but it doesn't progress any further than the error message I gave above.
I'm wondering if the encryption process of file-vault is linked directly with the original installation I had of Mac OS-X before I Archived and installed.
Any thoughts/knowledge/Insight?? I want my old Mac back! (I don't recommend using file-vault). Any body else had this problem or can see what is happening to me here?
Thank you
Greg

I just did a backup, moved a folder with 600mb of images into a different folder, and did another backup. The free space on the backup drive dropped by the size of the folder's contents. The backup copied the files as I watched in System Preferences, and it looked like it was really copying the files to the external drive again. It looks like Time Machine isn't as smart as I hoped in this regard.
Still - I'd think the wasted space is only in the every-hour-for-the-last-24-hours bucket of Time Machine. I'm guessing the every hour backups are like a sliding window, where a backup that's 24 hours old drops out every hour rather than all the hourly backups getting wiped at midnight and starting over.
Regardless, only one version of the moved folder will eventually be stored as the daily backup for that day. I don't have proof, but that's what I think.
So, if you've moved a bunch of folders around or renamed them, the extra copies of the same exact files should drop off within 24 hours.
That's my interpretation, but I'm in no way positive!! The lengthy Ars review didn't offer an answer to this question.

Encrypted time machine backup freezes OS X

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for