Trouble is, I don’t understand what this page is saying. How can I back up my home directory that’s currently protected with FileVault? Is just turning it off enough? It doesn’t say so outright, so I’m not sure.
Also this:
I did run CCC while logged into a FileVault protected account. Does this mean that the backup now resting in my external HD is corrupt and useless?
If I created another, guest account and logged into it to back up with CCC, would I have to reinstall CCC in that account? Would I even be able to back up my main home directory in a guest account?
I know I could ask all this on CCC’s website, but I think I might get more exposure to my question here, and if it fails, I can always cut and paste. Thanks!
You can turn FileVault off every time you backup, though that essentially negates the protection, since your backups will all no longer be encrypted. That may be okay with you if your reason for using FileVault is only if the laptop itself is stolen.
The other option, (assuming you want to keep using CCC) is to give up on incremental backups. This would require more disk space, but if your home directory is not large, this could also be workable. Easiest way to do this without causing problems might be to create another account and run the backups from that one.
It may also be possible to mount the FileVault disk image as a read-only volume (again, from another account). Then you’d be able to have incremental backups as the files will be readable. This would probably be the best, but I don’t know enough about FileVault to know how easy this is.
This is a guess at why this doesn’t work: Normal incremental backup checks each file in order, and copies only those that have changed. If it’s working on File A, it’s not bothered if you change File B elsewhere on the drive while the backup is in progress. Either it’s already copied an old version of File B or it will get to it later.
Encryption (FileVault) essentially scrambles all the files it’s set to protect, which means that every single one of those files must stay the same, or the backup will be useless. The warning is that even if you yourself aren’t messing around with the files, files on the disk might change just because you’re logged into the account or have an image mounted with the ability to write to it.