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Apple's FileVault, anyone ?

UltraNEO*

UltraNEO*

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 16, 2007
4,057
16
近畿日本
Out of all the people on this community.

I'd like know and I wonder who uses this feature? Along with your experience regarding this feature, I'd like your opinions as to how stable and safe, it is? If you have advice to avoid it, please can you state why?

20080427-qtu5fim7e4sukkh9d8cjb894j5.jpg


I'm thinking of using this feature to protect the drive's content more than anything.. but I don't wanna risk losing data on my drive if it's actually slightly buggy - Hence, asking for your valuable advice.

Many thanks.
 
FWIW, I disagree generally with the linked thread. My iBook was filevaulted and my iMac is currently filevaulted. I have had no issues with it (which obviously contributes to my disagreement), but more to the point I back up regularly. If you want to use Filevault, you have to backup. Yes, agreed, using an encrypted disk (my Eee is encrypted using another piece of software on Linux, too) is more risky in terms of data loss due to a disk logical error of some kind, but that risk is manageable (by backing up), and in many cases (e.g. storing patient data, if you do that), disk encryption is the right thing.

So get a backup drive, and use a secure backup option (e.g. either make sure the drive is physically secured when not in use, or use a cloning program like SuperDuper and clone the encrypted disk (so that the backup is also encrypted).
 
I've never had any major issues... but as long as the hard drive's big, it seems to work nicely. If the hard drive's small, it seems I'll run out of disk space all the time.
 
I have no idea why a screenshot has a copyright as well, especially since it's Apple that did the design for that panel.

Anyway, I agree with mkrishnan and ayeying. I've been using FileVault since 10.4.8 and haven't had any issues whatsoever. However .... I do keep some files in /Users/Shared, such as my VMWare and Parallels images.

If you want to go the full disk encryption route, PointSec is releasing an OSX version of their FDE product very soon. It is on par (for the most part) with the Windows and Linux versions.
 
I've found that Filevault can slow things down dramatically depending on what you're doing. Any thing that writes heavily to the drive or memory will be affected.
 
I never noticed any slowdown but when I was encoding video and deleting the original files it wouldn't recapture the hard drive space until I rebooted. This was with Tiger.
 
nb705 said:
I've found that Filevault can slow things down dramatically depending on what you're doing. Any thing that writes heavily to the drive or memory will be affected.
Click to expand...

Often times these things will be things that you don't need encrypted; it would be good to move them outside the encryption space, if possible. On my iMac, the iTunes library, for instance, is in /users/shared so that it does not get encrypted. But yeah, it does have a performance hit associated with it. But when you need it, that's kind of irrelevant. Wearing a seatbelt in a car has a comfort hit associated with it. Doesn't mean you should not wear your seatbelt.
 
mkrishnan said:
Often times these things will be things that you don't need encrypted
Click to expand...
My view would be that very little on my Mac, and really on most people's Macs, needs to be encrypted. I've found using password-protected disk images is a great way to protect sensitive data without encrypting my entire user directory.

mkrishnan said:
Wearing a seatbelt in a car has a comfort hit associated with it. Doesn't mean you should not wear your seatbelt.
Click to expand...
True. I'd probably be even safer driving with a full helmet, gloves, pads, and a flame-retardant uniform. But in the end, I decided that the seat belt is a good balance of safety and convenience. Much like my disk images. ;)
 
emw said:
My view would be that very little on my Mac, and really on most people's Macs, needs to be encrypted. I've found using password-protected disk images is a great way to protect sensitive data without encrypting my entire user directory.
Click to expand...

It really depends on what you do with your Mac. If I didn't work in and for a hospital, I'd agree completely. But even if I don't have patient files on the Mac in question, there are possibilities that there are Mails in my Inbox that are sensitive, files in my web cache, etc, etc. Even if I don't transmit such data, someone else may send it to me and it's still potentially exposed on my computer. So that's why I find encrypting the home drive and moving selected items out easier than doing the reverse.

If I didn't have HIPAA concerns, I'd probably be satisfied with just a password protect. I don't see a lot of value in disk encryption for people who don't have work related concerns -- i.e. I wouldn't advocate encrypting the disk or the home folder because you're concerned about your credit card information or something like that.
 
^ Fair enough. I don't deny that some would have a legitimate reason for using it - and you're squarely in that category given the sensitivity of the data you're carrying. There's no question when it comes to personnel records or patient information, you need to be very careful in how you protect the data.
 
They're a photographer, the copyright is probably applied automatically when it's uploaded to the site.
 
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