Pro-Con: of using a .dmg as a encrypted folder

[FHayek]

All,

I have a folder containing files including Wills, Trusts, personal financial statements etc. Most of these files are word docs, excel spreadsheets, PDF's and jpegs. I would like to protect this folder from prying eyes.......

If this info was housed in a .dmg, it would seem pretty straightforward to click on the .dmg, enter my password, mount the drive, access the information/folder and when finished, eject the disk image knowing it is closed and protected.

Am I missing something? Any pros/cons of this idea?

Cheers-
FH

 

[chown33]

I do this. No cons I've found.

Just don't lose your password. Write it down and store it in a safe place, and make sure you remember the place. For extra security, store a second copy in a completely different safe place, so if your house burns down or floods out, you still have the password.


Make sure you DISABLE Spotlight indexing of the encrypted drive. Otherwise Spotlight indexes the contents when the DMG is mounted, and keeps the data in unencrypted form for doing searches.

 

[FHayek]

Thank you.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Make sure you DISABLE Spotlight indexing of the encrypted drive. Otherwise Spotlight indexes the contents when the DMG is mounted, and keeps the data in unencrypted form for doing searches.

Only on the encrypted drive.

 

[chown33]

Only on the encrypted drive.

I think there was an issue in older OS versions where some index data escaped the encrypted DMG. I don't remember the details, because it was at least a couple years ago.

You're right that indexes should only reside on the disk (or disk image) they refer to. I think the encrypted-DMG issue was a bug. Since the OP didn't say which OS version, I thought caution was best.