An Easy, Automated Way To Backup And Secure Your Mac’s Files With Encryption

Are Mac backups important? Well, duh! Yes. Either because our files are sensitive and should not be made easily available to anyone else, or, because replacing all our photos, movies, music, apps, and files would be a royal pain in the proverbial patootie.

Mac backup apps are a dime a dozen. Sometimes less. Apps that schedule backups, backup files everywhere, and encrypt the backup files contents are few and far between.

And they’re not priced like a sale at Walmart, either (and usually not easy to setup and use).

What’s The Big Idea?

The idea behind a secure backup isn’t just to backup files. That’s actually easy. The idea is to do so seamlessly, simply, with a minimum of effort and a maximum of security.

One of the geeky Mac apps that helps our office keep files secure is called Knox. What it does is what you really want. Easy backups, handled quickly and efficiently, but with high grade security– up to 256-bit AES encryption.

Knox does the magic by using the Mac’s built-in encrypted disk images feature. You know, like FileVault, only better.

Because Knox uses a Mac’s disk image an encrypted vault of backup files can be opened on any Mac. You just need the password.

The Knox Vaults menu resides in the Mac’s Menubar so it’s just a click away to create, open, close, and backup any vault.

Knox even has an option to allow Spotlight searching within a vault, on a vault-by-vault basis. Or, disable indexing entirely. The advantage here is that Spotlight stores the vault index on the vault so contents are not searchable unless the vault is open.

This is a handy app to securely store files using a USB flash drive. Plug it in, backup, unplug, and go.

Think about the data on your Mac that should be secured. Patient information. Banking and financial information. Legal documents. Company trade secrets. All these items are vulnerable when traveling by notebook, but Knox makes it easy to keep them secure, yet make them easy to open and use.

Nicely done, elegant and secure backup solution, but priced like a business app.