Hot answers tagged filevault
29
I've had a very similar issue, and so I decided to compile several methods for solving it. So, following, there are those options and some of them I got from the answers already provided here. I understand this is a little bit offtopic from the question, but it's in tune with the answers. This has many parts and those are all softwares I could try myself ...
16
Disk Inventory X is another excellent disk space visualizer.
FileVault or any other third party software is not necessary at fault here.
Mac OS X is simply a complex and modern operating system that uses disk space is dynamic and often unpredictable ways. Not only does the swapfile grows and shrinks but OS X also has a sub system that creates a Dynamic ...
15
Download and run GrandPerspective for a nice graphical view of what's occupying disk space -- something like this:
Run this before and after the reboot and you should be able to see what the big differences are.
11
No, it's not. Some say it's a benefit if you have geo-location and remote wipe configured (or other similar software) as it increases the chance that someone finding the Mac will connect it to the Internet.
What's happening is that you also have Find My Mac on. That enables a Safari-only guest account which will allow users to log in and run Safari. The ...
10
John Siracusa's detailed Lion review covers the new FileVault disk encryption feature in great detail:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/13#lion-file-system
To summarise, the new system is "volume" based. This means that not all volumes can be or are encrypted. The Lion recovery partition for example is not encrypted. Non Mac ...
9
There are a number of possible pitfalls to having an encrypted home folder; most of them are more-or-less intrinsic to the idea, so they're not likely to go away... ever.
UPDATE: Lion's FileVault 2 uses full-volume encryption rather than just home-directory, so it actually does make some of these issues go away and changes several others. I've added notes ...
9
Your question contains the most important thing needed to secure a computer against a motivated attack to compromise a FileVault 2 protected Mac volume.
Don't connect FireWire to a device you don't or can't trust while you are logged in to an account that has file vault keys active.
Pick good single use passwords to reduce the chance of other compromises ...
8
Encryption happens on-the-fly. If the data was written to the hard drive, then passed through an encryption algorithm that then deleted the written data and re-wrote it, encrypted, that would be hella inefficient, and would largely defeat the purpose. I think the answer to your question is no, but of course remember that if you're going from a data set ...
8
If you hover over the disabled option, a tooltip appears explaining that the guest account can't be activated with FileVault turned on:
This is because the new FileVault uses full-disk encryption that's decrypted by the login password of one of the users. As the guest account, by its nature, does not have a password, that would leave your computer ...
8
Yes. FileVault2 is volume based so you can have an encrypted Mac OS volume and an unencrypted Windows bootcamp partition for instance. The Recovery partition is also not encrypted.
FileVault2 requires Lion to decrypt/decode the drive. It doesn't work with Windows Linux, or previous versions of Mac OS X. I recommend John Siracusa's Lion review for more ...
8
No, the backups will not be encrypted automatically, but it's very easy to enable for directly attached disks. Just check "Encrypt Backup Disk" in the Time Machine disk selection settings.
If you're backing up to another Mac, you can use Disk Utility on that Mac to erase non-boot drives and put an encrypted partition on them:
7
It's not possible (at least not that I know) to specify Filevault's target dir. It will work by automatically working with your home folder by creating (if you are in Leopard or above) a Sparse Bundle (or a Sparse Disk Image if you are in Tiger). The reason for the change has to do with Time Machine (and to allow -to a certain extent- to backup a FileVaulted ...
7
Borrowing heavily from John Siracusa's Lion review...
FileVault 2 is a Whole Disk Encryption system, as opposed to just a 'store your home folder in an encrypted disk image' solution. It's implemented as a filesystem layer below the actual volume that you unlock at system boot time. If you're familiar with LVM, it's much the same way. Whenever you get past ...
7
Nope, you can’t. When FileVault is enabled, the disk needs to be decrypted on every boot. As the computer can’t access files on the disk, It generates a simple login screen so that you can enter your password and decrypt the disk. This UI is hardcoded into the firmware of your computer, and can’t be changed.
Source: ...
6
The new Filevault seems to put far fewer constraints on you than the old version. You don't have to log out for time machine to work, for example, and all the sharing daemons appear to work fine (some of them were disabled when filefault was enabled if I recall correctly. I think web sharing was among them, which made my laptop a bit useless as a ...
6
Other than making sure you have power available when you turn on or off the entire disk's worth of IO to encrypt/decrypt, performance and power deltas are barely measurable.
Less than 1-2% is what I'm seeing. Other than hammering large IO benchmarks, in practice it doesn't matter one bit whether FileVault 2 is on or off for the initial build of Lion.
As ...
6
How to disable that “Guest User” from appearing at the OS X 10.7.2 login screen
Open System Preferences
Click on “Security & Privacy”
Click the lock in the lower corner and type in your administrative
password to unlock the control panel
Check the box next to “Disable restarting to Safari when screen is
locked”
This prevents the Guest User account ...
6
No, Windows does not support FileVault (so it would not boot if it was encrypted thus!) The Windows option would be BitLocker.
(perhaps it is more correct to say FileVault does not support anything but Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions)
If you need a great, free, cross-platform, open-source, strong encryption tool check out TrueCrypt.
Can you use ...
5
When I need partial encryption and especially when the encrypted container needs to be portable, I turn my head to TrueCrypt, which is free & open source software, available for the major operating systems, and can
create encrypted containers
create encrypted virtual disk images
encrypt entire disks
create hidden & encrypted volumes (by ...
5
It sounds like the space recovered is from your swap (vm) and sleepimage files. Restarting will clear the files in /var/swap/ which can grow considerably if you're running out of RAM or are using a laptop. If you are using a laptop you'll find a file called sleepimage that is the size of the amount of RAM you have installed and it can be safely deleted - ...
5
Mount
SSH lets you create a ~/.ssh/rc that will be executed right after the environment has been set up, but before any shell will be active (so beware of that; search for "sshrc" in man ssh(8) for more informations).
So, to mount your FileVault partition you can add this line to your ~/.ssh/rc file:
hdiutil attach /Users/$USER/$USER.sparsebundle ...
5
No.
Time Machine backups are not encrypted by default. You have to opt-in. The configuration is easy if the backup drive is connected via USB/Firewire. If the backup drive is connected by Ethernet/Wi-Fi, the process of setting up Time Machine is more complicated.
Connected via USB/Firewire
Select the option in System Preferences → Time Machine ...
4
It is possible to backup your FileVaulted home directory with Time Machine while logged in. The files will be stored unencrypted in the Time Machine volume, just like other files. I've written a blog post explaining the whole process here.
4
Daniel Jalkut's blog today has a post that may be what you're looking for.
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/1935/lions-whole-disk-encryption
Apparently, this:
% diskutil cs convert /Volumes/Data -passphrase [yourPasswordHere]
I haven't tried this yet, I just got Lion installed about an hour ago. Any destruction of your system is on your own head.
4
It is not impossible. (Although if you have deleted user you may have made this more complicated!)
I wrote the article 'jaydisc' linked to and just tested that it still works in 10.7.4:
Assume that you have an admin user 'charlie' that you want to be able to use, but not unlock, the computer:
sudo su - charlie
$ passwd
Changing password for charlie.
...
4
I have a 2011 uMBP 15" i7 QC, 8GB RAM, with a OCZ Vertex 3 256GB SSD & Corsair F120. AFTER enabling FileVault 2, I did notice a throughput penalty (VERTEX 3) specifically, large file size write. Sequential reads showed 2-5% impact. Where write-throughput dropped >100MB/s. I owe the forum a more detailed comparison.
Regardless, having a secure volume ...
4
I'm quoting this directly from a post in this thread at Apple Discussions:
This isn't a bug. This is the way FileVault-2's EFI boot authentication UI is built. When your Mac first starts up, EFI-boot takes over to decide what to do. It either continues to bring up the system to the typical OSX login screen, which is managed by OSX's system preferences, ...
4
This appears to be by design.
Keep in mind, the whole drive is still encrypted with File Vault. The 10.7.2 Guest/Safari-only User only has access to / runs off the Recovery partition, not the main volume where your user data and applications are stored.
If someone does login to the Guest User, they have no access to the system partition, and as a bonus, ...
4
Time Machine makes a second copy of your data and operates above the Core Storage layer.
File Vault is simply Core Storage setting a scrambling / encryption of all data before it gets written and after it gets read from one or more physical drive(s).
Combined, you can have FV on your real data and not on your TM data. Or the opposite. Or both or none. It ...
4
The two technologies share nothing except the name and cannot be directly compared. The old Filevault created a spare bundle image file for your home folder, which was encrypted. The new one simply encrypts the whole drive in a way that is invisible to the user.
If anything there may be a slight overheard to managing a sparsebundle which will not be there ...
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