Is it possible to access Time Machine on an older mac OS and PCs?

[Ant]

Hello.

Is it possible to access external USB HDDs' Mojave v10.14.6 Time Machine
encrypted back up files with an older Mac (e.g., 2008 MacBook Pro's El
Capitan v10.11.6) or a PC (Linux, Windows, etc.)?

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering. :)
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[Lewis]

In message <_oGdnST1Ev_kvybC...@earthlink.com> Ant <a...@zimage.comANT> wrote:
> Hello.

> Is it possible to access external USB HDDs' Mojave v10.14.6 Time Machine
> encrypted back up files with an older Mac (e.g., 2008 MacBook Pro's El
> Capitan v10.11.6) or a PC (Linux, Windows, etc.)?

Not with a PC, they cannot even read the disk format.

I've never tried to access a current TM drive with an older macOS
version. I would guess that generally it would work and in some specific
cases (where TM has changed between versions, for example) it will not.

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[Krzysztof Mitko]

Ant wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Is it possible to access external USB HDDs' Mojave v10.14.6 Time Machine
> encrypted back up files with an older Mac (e.g., 2008 MacBook Pro's El
> Capitan v10.11.6) or a PC (Linux, Windows, etc.)?
>
> Thank you for reading and hopefully answering. :)

On PC - no. What I do is apart from regular Time Machine drives, I have an
external disk formatted in FAT and I created an encrypted 128-bit encrypted
HFS+ sparsebundle image on it. Occasionally I sync my documents between the
sparsebundle and hard drive. On windows, HFS Explorer can extract files from
such image. This is not a full system backup, just a copy of crucial documents
if I ever have absolutely no mac in sight. I'm not sure if you can setup Time
Machine inside a sparsebundle.

On Mac - depending on how old is your system; on El Capitan you should be able
to access the disk just like any encrypted external drive. Not sure if Time
Machine will work, probably not, but worst case scenario you can always
manually copy files from the mounted drive. You will need third party software
like Paragon Retrofit Kit if the disk is formatted in APFS.

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