File Vault woes?

[advres]

OK,

So now that I have my laptop hooked up to my works network I wanted to use the file vault function in panther to encrypt my home folder from possible nosey co-workers. For some reason it will not let me do it. I keep getting an error message that looks like this:

http://home.comcast.net/~advres/Picture_2.jpg

I have 31GB of space left on my drive. Can anyone figure out why I am not able to encrypt it?

[emw]

The only thing I can think of is that you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 33GB in your home folder. I believe that when FileVault does an encryption it essentially creates a new version of your home folder and then copies the data from your old home folder into the new encrypted one.

You might want to check out Mac Help from the Finder and do a search on File Vault - it has some notes on possible impact if you are using it in a networked scenario.

[advres]

I didn't even think about the fact that I should check to see how big my actual home folder was like an idiot. :o It turns out that you need a little more space than what you are using temporarily. I had a home folder of a bit more than 29GB.

I solved the problem, thanks! :)

[emw]

Glad to help. I'd be interested to hear if you have any "strange" behavior running FileVault.

I was running it before and noticed that my desktop icons would sometimes be doubled, but they still pointed to the same file. That is, if I deleted one, they both were deleted. If I moved one, they would both move, albeit somewhat randomly.

After turning off FileVault, the issue went away.

[Horrortaxi]

I used FileVault for several months for work. I never noticed any performance problems. If you need the security it's a good feature.

but

You're not using FileVault correctly. It won't do anything to keep people from snooping you on the network. Your computer is on and your home folder is mounted so your data is available. FileVault only protects your data when your computer is off or you're logged out of your account.

What you want to do is turn on your firewall. That's what will keep people on the network from snooping.

[Moof1904]

From my experience with FileVault, I suggest that you proceed with caution. It's my understanding that FileVault is seen as a separate volume that is not filesystem checked on startup. My FileVault became corrupted in a way that would have likely been handled by OSX's routine startup disk maintenance, but because the FileVault's contents were not being checked, the volume became damaged. I was able to fix the trouble by booting from another drive and manually mounting the FileVault partition and running TechTools Pro on it, but it was a tense time repairing it. I finally decided FileVault wasn't worth it and disabled it.