Store Mail folders and prefs on a secure disk image

Apr 17, '03 09:57:00AM

Contributed by: tcurtin

Use the following solution to securely encrypt and keep backups of your mail folders and preferences (along with any other important documents - I keep all of my office and personal documents this way as well.)

Eject SecureDisk from your desktop, click on the Mail icon in your dock, and everything should start up as it always does, only this time it will first ask for the encryption password and mount the SecureDisk disk image! If it doesn't, just go back into the trash and put everything back where it was before.

Once a week or so, I start up Disk Copy, choose File/Convert (Apple-K), open the SecureDisk.dmg file, save it with image format compressed, encryption AES-128, name it SecureDiskBackup.dmg, and then use the Finder's File -> Get Info (Apple-I) to set it Locked. Someday soon I'll make a script to automate that backup process - any kind souls with more AppleScripting experience want to paste the code here? Burn the backup to CD, copy it to another drive, whatever suits you, and you now have any important documents encrypted, backed up, etc!

Enjoy!

[robg adds: Though I haven't tried this, one caveat to keep in mind is that if a system update tries to update Mail, it may not work (as it won't find it /Applications). I'd recommend putting the application back in /Applications prior to running any updates.]

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