Fine, you have your SuperDuper! installed and paid for, but it doesn't do the trick. You can tell it to ignore the sparseimage which is your encrypted home with ignore Users/.*, but it won't make a copy of the home directory as it is, even when its nicely mounted.
The solution is to write a small shell script which calls rsync to do the rest of the backup after everything else has been copied. That small script might look something like this:
#!/bin/sh rsync -a -E /Users/* "$4/Users/" exit 0
The $4 is passed from SuperDuper! and contains the target drive location. exit 0 makes SuperDuper! happy so that it doesn't complain about rsync failing even though it did not. The only bad thing about this is that you don't really know how well the rsync went, so you'll need to check the backup manually.
Great, you have a full system backup with even your home directory on it ready save your day when the hard drive in that nice laptop gives up. But when you decide to try the backup, you find yourself unable to login. That's because OS X still thinks your using FileVault, but can't find it. You'll have to convince it otherwise.
The trick is to remove the information about the FileVault from your user account in the NetInfo database. Its not as scary as it sounds. Now if your system happened to have another admin account which didn't use FileVault the procedure is quite simple. You'll just need to login with that other account and run this command in a Terminal:
sudo nicl . -delete /users/youraccount home_locThat should allow you to login with that account without FileVault. If you didn't have another FileVault-free account, well, its a little more complicated and quite hard core. Here's how to do it:
Don't blame me if you broke something.