Backup vault with timemachine

Help Desktop App
1

I just setup my first cryptomator vault, cause I need a crypto solution to use on mac and windows. Till now I used filefault, but it is not accessible on windows. It´s just a vault on a local external ssd-drive.

Now of course I wanted to backup the data on the external drive with timemachine. The problem is, the device on which the vault is located is greyed out in the exclusion list within the timemachine options.

Am I doing something wrong? Did anybody manage to do backup with timemachine?

Regards,
Joachim

2

Just to be sure, we’re talking about the same thing: What drive is greyed out?

  1. The drive on which the vault is stored (i.e. the directory containing the d directory and the masterkey.cryptomator file)
  2. Or the drive that Cryptomator creates as soon as you unlock the vault?
3

I solved the problem. The reason is that only hfs/apfs volumes get backuped by timemachine. I formatted the drive accordingly and timemachine backs up the volume. But only the encrypted volume. It seems the mounted unencrypted volume is can not be backuped by time machine. Maybe there are options that can be used when mounting the volume…

4

Correct, this isn’t possible. At least I am not aware of any workaround.

5

Hi - just wondering but does that mean you can’t access your unencrypted files after restoring to a timemachine back up, i.e. even if you mount the cryptomator key that was backed up by timemachine?

6

I think there’s a misunderstanding.
You cannot select the mounted cryptomator drive (your opened vault) as source or target for your time machine backup, because apple does not accept that filesystem for this
Your encrypted vault files (the folder with the “d” directory and the masterkey file) can be part of a time machine backup (just as any other file), and of course after a restoration of these vault files, they can be decrypted again with cryptomator.

7

Thanks Michael, appreciate the response!

8

I have lost a single Excel file in the Vault because it was inadvertently deleted, and unfortunately synched to all other devices (the Vault is located within GDrive).
Thus, I wanted to restore it with my time machine backup:

  1. I opened the timemachine where all backups are stored.
  2. I then copied an older time machine backup of the encrypted vault files from gdrive (that should have still contained the lost file) to a folder on the desktop.
  3. I then opened cryptomator, “add existing vault” and chose the folder on the desktop, using its “vault.cryptomator” file.
  4. However, the folder the opened is the one with the actual data. For testing, I added a new “dummy Excel file” to my existing vault, which was also there in the oldtimemachine backup folder (where it didnt yet exist).

What may I be doing wrong? Would this require to first delete all of the current data (in the existing g-drive folder and place the old time machine backup into this folder and only then)?
→ This would render recovering single lost/deleted files which are encrypted with cryptomator a huge nuisance :confused:

9

Do you mount your old vault with the exact same name as the actual vault? If yes, have you tried to use an other name? To do so just rename the folder of your old vault (where the “d” folder and the masterkey file is in) and add this folder (aka vault) to your cryptomator.