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Sophos Free A-V For Mac May Kill Time Machine Backups

Posted by timothy on from the mysteriouser-enough-already dept.

kdawson writes "Herewith the tale of the instantaneous loss of 19 months of Time Machine backup data, with the possible involvement of a fresh install of Sophos's new free Mac A-V package. Sophos support has been contacted but has not responded as of this writing."

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Assuming this is true.... by zippthorne · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, it's separate files. You can browse it using finder or terminal.

    Unless you're backing up a filevault protected home directory. Then it handles it in just about the stupidest way possible: it saves the whole honking encrypted image as one big file.* And despite the fact that it doesn't decrypt the image, it still only works if you're logged in and the image is open.

    *If you're set up as sparse images, then you do a little better. But still, no incremental backups for you. If a file changes, you have to copy the *whole* thing, because good encryption won't make it obvious which bits of the file are different. Also, I'm not sure it can tell which files are, say, disk cache for the browser....

    --
    Can you be Even More Awesome?!
  2. Re:Assuming this is true.... by Rosyna · · Score: 5, Informative

    One thing. directly connected hard drives do not use sparse bundles if FileVault is not on,.