Live FileVault and Sparse Bundle Backups in Leopard

[ScottW]

Yea, you will get errors on it, make sure any subsequent backups against that file that you use the --delete flag. This will make sure everything is in sync. Even though you get a few errors, it is always mountable, never had any issues with it.

[fogr4]

Scott,

just wondering if the technique described here is still good to go ... i.e. no problems encountered?

I want to use it for something a little more sophisticated. I'm sharing my files between home and work via a small portable encrypted hard drive that I take back and forth. My accounts on both the home and work computer have the default home directory set to point the a folder on the external drive that contains the sparsebundle disk image. This works fine.

But when I go on travel, I really don't want to carry that extra hard drive around with me. In that case I want to use rsync to sync the external hard drive to the internal hard drive on my laptop, and when I get back from travel I want to rsync back to the external hard drive to take to work. It seems this should work well, since rsync'ing sparsebundle disk image is quick because there are far fewer bands than actual files. But since I would be working with with my actual home directory, no just a backup, it has to work perfectly every the time.

What do you think? ok to go ahead? Perhaps just to be safe I should only run rsync when I'm logged out of my account?

Off course you could just take the laptop back and forth to work and boot it in target mode. That works just as well, and wouldn't require having to sync all the time, but it's more convenient to just to carry a small hard drive around instead of the whole laptop.

[ScottW]

It should work fine. While I don't use this particular setup anymore myself, I never had any problems with it, and what you propose is just fine. In all my tests of backups and what not, it all worked just fine.