You've got it all backwards.

I am an adamant believer that we are living in the age of information. The knowledge that we collect and protect is now one of the biggest measures of our worth. This post is about the latter matter of protecting the data that you have either created or collected on your computer, specifically your Apple computer. This protection takes two forms: one is protecting the integrity of your data; and the second is protecting your data from prying eyes.

OS X has built in programs to help you do both of these things. The only problem is that these two programs do not work well together, but with a little perserverance and attention to detail they can be made to play together.

For encryption, Apple computers come stock with Filevault. This program will keep your home directory in an encrypted state, which means that if your precious silver laptop falls into the hands of the baddies, they will have to do more than scan your harddrive to learn your secrets.

For backup, Apples ship with Time Machine. This program is designed to save your files and folders to an external disk in hourly increments. With this you don't have to worry so much about the fearful harddrive crash that descimates all of your data.

The problem is that when you use Filevault to protect your data with encryption, you can no longer do live backups of your data. When you think about this it makes sence, but when you think about this it sucks. Luckily it still does work but it takes more forethought and is not as complete a solution.

How to use Time Machine when using Filevault:

1. Connect your external drive to your machine.
2. Log out of your Filevault encrypted account.
3. Make sure the logout dialog, specifically mentions that the directory is being saved.

Peace out.