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mzerobin

macrumors Chihuahua
Original poster
Nov 24, 2021
3
0
Hello everyone,
I already searched a substantial amount of time but did not succeed yet.
I used VeraCrypt to fully encrypt my external hard drive named Media which contains many media files such as photos, videos and music. Now, I want to backup the external hard drive to another external hard drive called Backups using Apples built in tool called Time Machine. Before I encrypted Media with VeraCrypt I was just using Time Machine to create backups of Media on Backups. Unfortunately, it does not work anymore.
Just to make things clear: I am running macOS Catalina 10.15.7. When I open TM and click on options I see the Media volume under the volumes which are excluded from backing up. Of course, I tried to remove it but it is grey and not clickable, and I do not know what to do. Furthermore, if I use CMD+I on the mounted volume it tells me the format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is supported by Time Machine as far as I know. However, if I go through the Disk-Utility app and have a look at the type it tells me the mounted volume is a Disk-Image-Volume, and Time Machine apparently cannot backup such a type.

So, my questions are:
  1. Is VeraCrypt compatible with Time Machine, i.e. can I use Time Machine to backup a Veracrypt encrypted external hard drive?
  2. I want to get rid of the built in encryption tool provided by Apple and use Veracrypt. So, can I encrypt the external hard drive Backups with VeraCrypt instead of the built in macOS encryption software and still use Time Machine? Note, I am using Backups also to backup my MacBook (I do not know whether this is a problem or not).
Thank you to everyone who can help me out specifically with question 1 since I already searched through Google, Reddit, AskDifferent, Youtube and VeraCrypt Documentation...without success.

Information: I already posted on AskDifferent and Sourceforge (Veracrypt forum, not very active) but did not get any satisfying answers...
 
Last edited:
I would suggest taking a look at Sun Knudsen's Youtube channel.

He is an expert at using MacOS with Veracrypt including backup techniques and he is really good about answering questions you put in his video comments.

Good luck!
 
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