My Apple iMac started to behave weird, with some Kernel Panics, grey screens and general crashes. While I was going through this I was pretty sure it wouldn’t hurt me as I had a TimeMachine for continuous backups. How wrong could I be!
After my Mac really crashed and my TimeMachine proved to be rubbish, I still managed to open the encrypted harddisk and made some backups by hand. I consider this quite a neat trick, so let me explain and perhaps save your day as well.
(updated with extra info)