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Oirectine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2003
243
88
Maryland
I want to implement File Vault on my PowerBook. However, I know that when it first came out, there were major problems, such as prefs being corrupted, etc. Does anyone have any recent experiences with File Vault, or happen to know if the problems have been ironed out by the good folks at Apple?

Also any other tidbits, such as how much space the encyrption takes up, or any other caveats I should be aware of, would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
 

Kelvin

macrumors member
Feb 18, 2004
31
0
SFBA, CA
I have File Vault enabled on my powerbook and, yes, most of the problems seem to be ironed out. I enabled FV with the fresh 10.3 install, back then I had my home directory disappear, as well as other anomalies (though none that were permanent).

In 10.3.4 I have not seen many problems. My biggest issue is that after a lot of disk traffic, you get a "do you want to reclaim space?" dialog upon logout, which can extend your shutdown; in some cases I've closed my powerbook without remembering, only to find the battery dead (and damaged from 0%'ing) because it never shutdown or went to sleep. When using mlMac for my P2P, FV wastes so much space that I sometimes get crashes.

When FV is enabled and you are logged in, the disk space that held a deleted file is not reclaimed upon trashing (though it is when new files are written). So as a result, FV can fill up your disk totally in cases like my above mentioned P2P problem. Once there is a lot of wasted space, FV takes _FOREVER_ to reclaim the space upon logout (there is no lag when logging in or using files).
 

Oirectine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 11, 2003
243
88
Maryland
Well I just tried to start FileVault, and got this error message:

Turning on FileVault requires an additional 11657067 KB of free disk space to create an encrypted copy of the home folder. Try emptying the Trash or deleting files you don't need


Apparently that's 11 Gigs. The strange thing is that I have over 17 Gigs free. Weird.

Also if FileVault takes up that much space... Yikes. I only have 60 gigs total. Does it really take up that much space?
 

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
Oirectine said:
Well I just tried to start FileVault, and got this error message:

Turning on FileVault requires an additional 11657067 KB of free disk space to create an encrypted copy of the home folder. Try emptying the Trash or deleting files you don't need


Apparently that's 11 Gigs. The strange thing is that I have over 17 Gigs free. Weird.

Also if FileVault takes up that much space... Yikes. I only have 60 gigs total. Does it really take up that much space?
Mac OS X is trying to tell you that it needs not 11 GB of space, but over 17 plus 11, or 28+ GB, free to make the encrypted disk image. FileVault basically requires that you have as much free HD space as the size of your home directory, plus a small amount of overhead, to enable.
 

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
I used FileVault on my iBook starting when they fixed it (10.3.1?) and never had any complaints about it. It did not seem to slow things down and I didn't have any data loss or get locked out of my disk image.

I turned FileVault off a few days ago (left my job and consequently the need to keep anything private on that computer) and it seems a little faster. That could just be mental though. I got back a ton of disk space though--and that isn't in my mind. 8GB suddenly reappeared.

FileVault is great if you need it.
 

MoparShaha

Contributor
May 15, 2003
1,646
38
San Francisco
I used FileVault briefly, but realized it's overkill. I have only a few folders that I need encrypted, and I just make encrypted disk images with DiskUtility for them. It's much easier, and there's less chance that something will go wrong. Why encrypt everything from bookmarks to preferences when you just need some documents protected?
 
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