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I found this Q&A (Backup mounted drive of an image in Time Machine) and this prompted me to ask the following question:

I have two disk images which are scripted to be mounted on login. These two disk images are always mounted to the same location. These two disk images are encrypted TrueCrypt volumes.

Time Machine (TM) will only back up the disk images the first time they are mounted, but not after that. As I modify documents within the volumes throughout the day, the modified timestamps are adjusted properly. However, TM does not back them up. TM never backs up the mount points which are two folders within my home directory.

Any ideas as to why neither the mount point or the image files are backed up? Do the image files have to be closed (unmounted) after being modified for TM to back them up?

Thanks,

Chris

4 Answers 4

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TM will not backup mounted volumes unless you remove them from the "do not back up these disks" list.

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From what I've read for File Vault, Time Machine will only backup once you've logged out. I'm guessing that Time Machine see's the File Vault/images and not the contents so can't backup the file while it is locked by OSX/TruCrypt. If this is the case (and you can test by unmounting the image and watching to see if Time Machine backs it up) then you'll have to script unmounting the images to allow Time Machine to back them up. There's more info here regading File Vault.

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Here is the resolution:

Apparently time machine checks the parent folder's timestamp before moving into that folder to look for modified files.

So as I was modifying files, the timestamps on the volumes were changing but not the containing directory. Because of this, TimeMachine saw the parent directory had not changed, so did not look for the changed volumes inside.

So to resolve this, I wrote a simple touch script which touches the parent directory to match the modified volumes timestamp (if there is a modified volume).

Thanks,

Chris

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TrueCrypt, by default, preserves the modification timestamp of file containers. To change this, pull up TrueCrypt's preferences page, then on the security tab, UNCHECK "Preserve modification timestamp of file containers". Umount and remount your volume. Now, time machine will see that the file container has changed any time you modify the contained files, and will back up the entire container.

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