Time Machine Vault

Abstract

SecurityAgent plugin to mount an encrypted home directory in a way that Time Machine the integrated backup engine of OS X Leopard can do incremental backups. Subsequently the Galaxy frontend can be used to retrieve single files instead of whole home directories. Of course this is only useful if you have an encrypted Time Machine backup...

Introduction

The File Vault encrypted home directory provided by Mac OS X has several drawbacks. One of them is that Time Machine will not backup individual files but only the whole encrypted home directory (or changed bands in case of a sparse bundle). One consequence is that you can't use the UI to get older files back from a backup. You only may get back the whole home directory without the ability to look at the contents first.

Here Time Machine Vault steps in. It is a SecurityAgent plugin designed to be called during login for mounting an encrypted disk image or bundle. This volume holds the home directory which is referenced by a relative symbolic link from /Users/. Time Machine will backup the contents of the encrypted volume and the symbolic link pointing to it. When the UI kicks in and you select the home directory for browsing the system will follow the link and you end up in the correct backup directory. This way even the selective restore function from Address Book does work as designed.

If not used as an encrypted home directory this disk image may still be used to hold private data with automatic mounting. The plugin is smart enough to check for the existence of a sparse bundle so if no encrypted volume is available nothing happens and the login process is as usual.

Getting the source

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Compiling

This is an XCode 3.0 based project. Make sure you have installed at least this release of XCode.

Running the Build command should do the job for you. You'll find all the parts of the application in the build directory.

Credits

This application is based on EncFSVault a SecurityAgent plugin for using EncFS encrypted directories as a home directory instead of File Vault.

The author of EncFSVault is Stephen Baker (baker (the dot) stephen (the strange a) gmail (another dot) com).

See ​http://www.chuckknowsbest.com/ikrypt/encfsvault.html and ​http://code.google.com/p/encfsvault/

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this application except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

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