If you don't mind me asking - what are you gaining using True Crypt - I've just moved over to the Mac and it seems to have build in capabilities to create encrypted volumes - and sparse ones that grow with size.
One thing that has made me cautious of encrypted containers is that I had a virtual volume on the PC with 20,000 photos. Something went wrong with the file handle for the encrypted container itself, chkdsk ran and began deleting the photos saying they were corrupt. It had removed 2000 before I managed to stop it. And trust it to happen in one of the few periods in my life where I had zero time to do backups for months.
So from my experience containers have danger. I read similar for the filevault, something goes wrong with it and everything is lost. But yet again, I'd rather have my photos in an encrypted container as i don't fancy ten years of personal (not that personal) photos being in someone else's hands.
Yeah, Filevault is just a file that OS X mounts as your home directory. It's not completely secure for reasons people have mentioned, and it's just kind of a pain, and has performance issues, and personally I wouldn't really trust it.
Right now Truecrypt doesn't handle whole drive encryption on OS X (from what someone on this thread told me), but assuming they add that so it's like the PC version, it's a much better solution than something like file vault. Basically nothing's going to go wrong with it, and it even forces you to generate an emergency disc in case some other program mucks up your boot sector or boot loader or whatever. The only way you're going to lose data is if you forget your password. It's totally seamless (unlike filevault) and just not flaky at all. It's also much more secure as NOTHING is getting written unencrypted, and every part of it is really well thought out in terms of security-almost absurdly so. Check that podcast if you want a ton of info on it.
The bigger concern are scanned bank instructions with signatures etc. and OS X seems a pain because unlike the PC it does not seem capable of being trained not to use home folders and seems to like to scatter personal details everywhere on disk.
WDE seems good but then I recall there was problems with master boot records getting corrupted etc.
Yeah, programs throwing random temp files all over the place is one of the reasons filevault isn't completely secure.
Boot records would basically only get corrupted if some program is misbehaving and writing to the first track on the disk that shouldn't be-but even still there's no risk because at worst Truecrypt's emergency disc will let you fix the master boot record, or even do an emergency unencrypt from the disc (along with other options). There was an issue discovered with the first release of Truecrypt 5 when used with Adobe/Macromedia products. It turns out that Adobe/Macromedia was hiding DRM related "activation" info in the first track on the disk. It shouldn't have been-I mean that's incorrect behavior (Adobe just thinks it's an obscure place to hide it). Basically Truecrypt's bootloader would wipe out the Adobe info (which isn't supposed to be there), and then Adobe's "activation" would wipe out the Truecrypt boot loader. Truecrypt was able to rewrite their loader to take up less space so Adobe's DRM garbage would fit there too-they released an update almost immediately after it was found.
At any rate, that issue was fixed (and it was really an Adobe problem)-I have Adobe products on my system and have no issues. And at worst, you'd just boot from the emergency CD to repair the boot sector or decrypt the drive-and I forgot to mention that not only does Truecrypt force you to build a repair disc, they even check it before allowing encryption to continue. The whole program's just insanely well thought out like that. Steve Gibson's...well he's Steve Gibson, and like I said, HE'S blown away by it and switched to it from commercial products that he used to use.
I forget I even have it on this system anymore (aside from every once in a while I remember, and it's like "ha ha, good luck getting data off that"
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Hopefully they'll be able to do a Mac version with feature parity. The Mac version I think was only released at all with version 5, so it may yet be coming.
Besides whole disk encryption, it's got a bunch of other features, but that's the main thing I use (it's does allow you to create an encrypted file container sort of like OS X has built in, but personally I'd trust True Crypt to do it more, if I had any use for that).
