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Encrypted containers backup...

S

scottsdomain

macrumors member
Original poster
May 30, 2008
51
2
I want to create an encrypted container to store sensitive data on my mac. The problem is I would also like to have the ability to backup that data. The container I was thinking about making is about 20gig.

The backup I use is external harddrives. They are formated with FAT so that I can "float" them between windows and mac. Since they are formated with FAT I can not put a 20gig file on it...

Any Ideas?

I was thinking about:
1) An encrypted container that breaks up on 2 gig chucks (can not find SW that does that)

2) A file system other then FAT that can be shared between windows and MAC, that I can put on my external HD...
a) NTFS (Windows support, not MAC)
b) MAC FS (No windows support?)
 
NTFS-3G allows OS X to read/write to NTFS (Windows) and it is free

MacDrive allows Windows to write to HFS+ (Mac OS X) but it is not free



Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
Speed

When using these do you get the native speed, or is there a penalty?

When moving big files will it take a long time?
 
scottsdomain said:
When using these do you get the native speed, or is there a penalty?

When moving big files will it take a long time?
Click to expand...

I move files all the time from ntfs formatted external drives to my mac. I have them formatted like that so I can "float" them between mac and pc as well, i just have ntfs-3g installed. Ntfs-3g is a great driver and I have noticed no speed decrease when copying files to ntfs formatted drives. I would use ntfs-3g and format your drives as ntfs.
 
Speed tests

I wanted to get a better idea of the speed, but didn't want to format my disk yet. (Have to move lots files for this, and not ready yet)

So I moved one of my video files it was about 2.23gb, the baseline it took about 1.5 minutes. Then I created a truecrypt volume that was 3GB and moved the file into there (note the volume was on my external drive) and it took about 2.0 minutes. Finally the test of interest I created another truecrypt volume and formated it with ntfs and repeated the same copy. This test with the ntfs took about 3.5 minutes. That means there is a penalty for using NTFS which appears to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1.4x or so...

You guys do not notice this delay?

I like the "free"ness of it, but I plan to keep 100s of those size files in sync.
 
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