Backup vault with timemachine

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

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?

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…

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

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?

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.

Thanks Michael, appreciate the response!