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Who uses FileVault in 10.5?

Do you use FileVault in Leopard?

  • Yes

    Votes: 11 20.4%

  • No

    Votes: 43 79.6%
  • Total voters
    54
C

cookieme

macrumors regular
Original poster
Just wondering whether I should use FileVault or not. I've been afraid of using after it was first introduced with Tiger or was it Panther and people were losing their information etc. Any ideas? Is it a bad idea if you have a lot of movies, music and photos in addition to a lot of documents? Is there a big performance drop?

Thanks
 
i will never use firevault again. after i applied it, when ever i deleted something it would seldom free up the space. i tried to disable it but it wouldnt disable. i had to eventually make a new user and transfer all my stuff
 
I just use encrypted disk images for sensitive documents. Works well and I don't have the need to encrypt my entire home folder.
 
it seems like you're ****ed if you use filevault and want ever want to turn it off. my computer wants 96 gigs of free space to turn it off, and there's no way i could ever get rid of that much. any suggestions on how to get it off would be much appreciated.
 
silentthunder77 said:
it seems like you're ****ed if you use filevault and want ever want to turn it off. my computer wants 96 gigs of free space to turn it off, and there's no way i could ever get rid of that much. any suggestions on how to get it off would be much appreciated.
Click to expand...

that happened to me, read my post
 
DanB91 said:
i will never use firevault again. after i applied it, when ever i deleted something it would seldom free up the space. i tried to disable it but it wouldnt disable. i had to eventually make a new user and transfer all my stuff
Click to expand...

Leopard has a better routine to reclaim unused space from the sparseimage file.

In Tiger, it would ask you if you wanted to compact ro not (thus just sitting at the prompt after a shutdown or restart request).

In Leopard, it starts to automatically compact the spares images after a restart/logoff/shutdown. You can cancel it if you can't wait. At least this way you can just reboot and walk away and it'll compact it without prompting.

It used to be an issue for me too, but I've got 1.5TB on my Mac now (250+250+250+750). Add my 1.5TB NAS and I've got 3GB in my home.

My only complaint with Filevault is that under some types of crashes, preferences tend to get corrupted or damaged so apps will reset to defaults. Unfortunately, this has happened once with Leopard as well. 🙁 I think it's a delay in writing the encrypted data to the image file that causes this. Really sucks when I have to resetup my dock or finder toolbars (whichseem to be the most frequent victims.
 
iVoid said:
Leopard has a better routine to reclaim unused space from the sparseimage file.

In Tiger, it would ask you if you wanted to compact ro not (thus just sitting at the prompt after a shutdown or restart request).

In Leopard, it starts to automatically compact the spares images after a restart/logoff/shutdown. You can cancel it if you can't wait. At least this way you can just reboot and walk away and it'll compact it without prompting.

It used to be an issue for me too, but I've got 1.5TB on my Mac now (250+250+250+750). Add my 1.5TB NAS and I've got 3GB in my home.

My only complaint with Filevault is that under some types of crashes, preferences tend to get corrupted or damaged so apps will reset to defaults. Unfortunately, this has happened once with Leopard as well. 🙁 I think it's a delay in writing the encrypted data to the image file that causes this. Really sucks when I have to resetup my dock or finder toolbars (whichseem to be the most frequent victims.
Click to expand...

So, you use filevault on 3GB of data, I assume that means that you store photos, movies etc outside your home folder?
 
cookieme said:
So, you use filevault on 3GB of data, I assume that means that you store photos, movies etc outside your home folder?
Click to expand...

Sorry... meant I have 3TB in my house (typo).

My Leopard home directory is 23GB. I keep videos elsewhere, but iTunes music is in my home directory.
 
iVoid said:
Sorry... meant I have 3TB in my house (typo).

My Leopard home directory is 23GB. I keep videos elsewhere, but iTunes music is in my home directory.
Click to expand...

How is it working out? Is it stable, i.e. any problems with data corruption or similiar?
 
cookieme said:
Just wondering whether I should use FileVault or not. I've been afraid of using after it was first introduced with Tiger or was it Panther and people were losing their information etc...
Click to expand...

Yeah, that pretty much turned me off of using it too. As a few people mentioned, encrypted disk images is a nice alternative.

I don't see myself trusting Filevault enough to use it anytime soon... at least not for my main computer.
 
I started using filevault on both my laptop and my wife's laptop. I hope I'm correct in my belief that if my laptop ever gets lost or stolen, without knowing the password, they can never access the stuff that's in my filevault protected directory, is that correct?

I haven't had any problems yet. But I'd like to take my music out of filevault though. I'd like to keep everything else in. If I ever lost my laptop, though the info's not sensitive, it is personal and I wouldn't want someone else going through it.

I like using iTunes to do all my music management. What's the easiest way to go about moving the music folder outside of my home directory and still letting iTunes have control of it like it was where it was? Is it just a simple setting change in iTunes?
 
Rizvi1 said:
I started using filevault on both my laptop and my wife's laptop. I hope I'm correct in my belief that if my laptop ever gets lost or stolen, without knowing the password, they can never access the stuff that's in my filevault protected directory, is that correct?

I haven't had any problems yet. But I'd like to take my music out of filevault though. I'd like to keep everything else in. If I ever lost my laptop, though the info's not sensitive, it is personal and I wouldn't want someone else going through it.

I like using iTunes to do all my music management. What's the easiest way to go about moving the music folder outside of my home directory and still letting iTunes have control of it like it was where it was? Is it just a simple setting change in iTunes?
Click to expand...

Hi Rizvi1

If you go to Preferences -> Advanced and click "Change" you can point iTunes to the new location of your music folder!

So, if you are currently storing all your music in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music you can simply move this folder outside your home folder or to an external drive and then make the change in iTunes.

🙂
 
cookieme said:
Hi Rizvi1

If you go to Preferences -> Advanced and click "Change" you can point iTunes to the new location of your music folder!

So, if you are currently storing all your music in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music you can simply move this folder outside your home folder or to an external drive and then make the change in iTunes.

🙂
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response cookieme.

I just copied my entire music folder into the Leopard : Users : Shared folder (sucks, I don't get a music icon on this folder). Then, I went into iTunes and changed the setting to this locatio ( Leopard : Users : Shared : Music : ITunes : ITunes Music ). I tried deleting the original music folder in the home directory itself but Leopard wouldn't let me saying it was needed by OSX. So I just deleted everything inside of it and emptied my trash can.

I logged out of Leopard and logged back in to get my disk space back ( that didn't seem to work, it still says I have the same amount of disk space available). I saw that the Music folder in my home directory now had the Album Artwork folder back (though it just has the Local folder) in it.

I started up iTunes and noticed my Library was empty now, but iTunes still remembers that my iTunes music folder location is in the Shared directory where I said it was. Also, now after firing up iTunes, there's an iTunes Library file and a iTunes Music Library.xml file.

Not sure what's going on. I hope this is all that's going to be created in this Music folder in my Home directory. I don't want to have to constantly be moving music files out from my home music directory to my shared directory because iTunes keeps automatically importing/copying music.
 
To all the people here saying how they prefer encrypted images of their sensitive documents... while I agree with that suggestion, it's not totally practical if you don't want your home directory contents easily accessed if your comp ever got lost. That's why I like filevault because it's not so much about my sensitive documents being protected, but more about all my personal information being protected such as photos, letters, etc.

So because all of that can change on a daily basis, I think FileVault works best for that. Unless there's a better option someone knows about.

Also, just wanted say I got my iTunes working after the move. Here's my orig post discussing my concerns...

Rizvi1 said:
Thanks for the response cookieme.

I just copied my entire music folder into the Leopard : Users : Shared folder (sucks, I don't get a music icon on this folder). Then, I went into iTunes and changed the setting to this locatio ( Leopard : Users : Shared : Music : ITunes : ITunes Music ). I tried deleting the original music folder in the home directory itself but Leopard wouldn't let me saying it was needed by OSX. So I just deleted everything inside of it and emptied my trash can.

I logged out of Leopard and logged back in to get my disk space back ( that didn't seem to work, it still says I have the same amount of disk space available). I saw that the Music folder in my home directory now had the Album Artwork folder back (though it just has the Local folder) in it.

I started up iTunes and noticed my Library was empty now, but iTunes still remembers that my iTunes music folder location is in the Shared directory where I said it was. Also, now after firing up iTunes, there's an iTunes Library file and a iTunes Music Library.xml file.

Not sure what's going on. I hope this is all that's going to be created in this Music folder in my Home directory. I don't want to have to constantly be moving music files out from my home music directory to my shared directory because iTunes keeps automatically importing/copying music.
Click to expand...

Basically just needed to replace the iTunes Library file that's in my home iTunes folder with the iTunes Library file that I had copied to the shared folder with my music. I also needed to copy in the Album Artwork folder into the Home directory. I've deleted these files that are in the Shared folder, leaving just the iTunes music files out there in the Shared. Now the Music folder in my Home directory is just 11 MBs.
 
Future Blues said:
Could anybody explain an easy way to make an encrypted disk image in 10.5?
Click to expand...

You'd just use Disk Utility in your Applications -> Utilities folder...

There's a New Image icon in there and encryption is one of the parameters.

If your folder is already set, I believe an easier way would be to use the File -> New -> Disk Image from Folder.. and then choose your folder and again select encryption as one of the parameters.
 
I've been using it on my MacBook with no problems (I do this mostly because I bring it to work with me every day and if it were stolen I'd rather not have people gain access to my files). However I do have at least three backups of all of my MacBook's data (and I mean all, even my music), two being offsite for all but my music, so even if I were to lose access to my home folder it's not difficult to recover it (I actually had to do this recently when I completely wiped the hard-disk and reinstalled Leopard from scratch. It only took about four or five hours to reinstall everything and was quite painless except for the fact that I decided to start at 10pm and didn't get much sleep that night 🙂 ).
 
I'm sending in my MacBook Pro to Applecare today and was thinking of having them reset my comp from scratch. I'll back everything up before I send it, but what I am scared about is losing my album artwork because it seem that's stored in the Home folder while my music is in the shared folder

again, the background to why I keep my music folder outside of the home/filevault folder something.. it's something I did on purpose to avoid making my filevault folder unnecessarily big. the logic is that if anyone ever stole my laptop, I don't care if they can access my music. what i don't want is them to have access to any of my documents, photos, etc
 
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