First Time MacBook Pro Customer with a few questions...

[Kyffin]

Just put your porn 3 or 4 folders deep with random names how nosey are these people who use you MacBook pro?

Disk Images are still the way- I keep my personal documents on them for security. As mentioned above, they're encrypted on the disk level so if anyone got hold of my computer and put the hard drive into an external enclosure they wouldn't be able to get to my accounts/letters/CV &c.

A very useful feature, and well worth learning about.

 

[heisenberg123]

Disk Images are still the way- I keep my personal documents on them for security. As mentioned above, they're encrypted on the disk level so if anyone got hold of my computer and put the hard drive into an external enclosure they wouldn't be able to get to my accounts/letters/CV &c.

A very useful feature, and well worth learning about.

read the link you posted back on post #2, do you have to pick a size for the disk image(folder)? what if you dont know how much space you will need if its a folder you will always be adding to?

 

[Kyffin]

read the link you posted back on post #2, do you have to pick a size for the disk image(folder)? what if you dont know how much space you will need if its a folder you will always be adding to?

Yes, you do have to pick a size to begin with- and it is fixed.

But its not that big a deal in practice- when you're getting to your limit you can
-make another one with the same password (if you want),
-transfer your data into the new one,
-delete the old one and
-rename the new to what you called the old one.
This effectively lets you increase the size of the disk image.

Its sounds more clunky than it is to do- and it has the advantage of behaving like the old one.

If I can give you an example: I'm pretty secretive with my schoolwork and keep my work in a disk image. So I can get to it easily, I make aliases to files and folders and put the aliases in my Documents folder. So when I look in Documents i see an alias to, say, "Essay". When i click Essay to open it, the disk image mounts and asks me for my password then opens the file normally. I like this as I can easily see and get to the things inside but know they're safely under lock and key.

This also works if you reference files in the disk image with another program (can't imagine why, but say if you keep your iTunes music in a disk image and want to play a track, it'll ask you for the password to begin with and afterwards not bother you again for when you want to play other tracks in your library). The great thing is, if you increase the size of the disk image as above it'll be act just like the smaller image- the only change being how much space you've got inside.

Hope this helps spread the love with disk images! I was sceptical until I started playing around and saw how useful they can be

 

[heisenberg123]

Yes, you do have to pick a size to begin with- and it is fixed.

But its not that big a deal in practice- when you're getting to your limit you can
-make another one with the same password (if you want),
-transfer your data into the new one,
-delete the old one and
-rename the new to what you called the old one.
This effectively lets you increase the size of the disk image.

Its sounds more clunky than it is to do- and it has the advantage of behaving like the old one.

If I can give you an example: I'm pretty secretive with my schoolwork and keep my work in a disk image. So I can get to it easily, I make aliases to files and folders and put the aliases in my Documents folder. So when I look in Documents i see an alias to, say, "Essay". When i click Essay to open it, the disk image mounts and asks me for my password then opens the file normally. I like this as I can easily see and get to the things inside but know they're safely under lock and key.

This also works if you reference files in the disk image with another program (can't imagine why, but say if you keep your iTunes music in a disk image and want to play a track, it'll ask you for the password to begin with and afterwards not bother you again for when you want to play other tracks in your library). The great thing is, if you increase the size of the disk image as above it'll be act just like the smaller image- the only change being how much space you've got inside.

Hope this helps spread the love with disk images! I was sceptical until I started playing around and saw how useful they can be

ahh i see so when you delete the old one it adds that disk space back to your overall free disk space on your hard drive?

 

[Kyffin]

Yes! Your hard drive space wont be eroded doing this- the disk image behaves just like a folder in this regard, pretty cool!

 

[briankeith513]

Ok, Kyff, and others..thanks.

I finally got it working correctly. Only problem is that, although it is password protected, its not actually hidden at all. However, yeah, I will just bury it deep inside like 3 or 4 other folders, and name it something that no one would know. Thanks again.

 

[Kyffin]

Great news- happy its helped. Now that you've got them safe, you can still hide the disk image, as described in this post above:

What he means is to give files a hidden tag.
It is a simple but not very secure way of hiding files from computer illiterates.

In OSX all you have to do is rename the file and put a dot at the beginning.

secret.docx -> .secret.docx

It will not show up in finder anymore nor can be found by spotlight.
Unfortunately getting your hands on it again is quite a lot more difficult than it is in Windows. You need to either enable/disable the show hidden files with terminal and restart finder or edit it in finder to remove the dot so it will become visibly.
Or use something like pathfinder that has a quick switch and is in general more of decent Application like Windows explorer. Finder is a rather stupid and useless program.

It should be obvious that is only a methode to hide stuff so other people don't stumble upon them but somebody looking for something will find it easily, considering that odd files that are hidden in a folder where you wouldn't expect also stand out in a way.

After doing this (i.e. change the disk image called "MyStuff" to ".MyStuff" so its hidden) I use a dashboard widget called "HiddenFiles" (I'm using Snow Leopard) to show these hidden files again. Its a bit less complicated than the methods outlined above but it does make them harder to find unless you know what you're looking for. This should have you covered!