I encrypted some drives with Disk Utility
and set a password hint. This hint does not show on a different computer. It's embarrassing because those were backup drives and losing the computer means also losing the key to the backup.
However, I found out by chance, when I was doing a boot from a live USB, that hints for startup disk encryption do show their password hints, as shown in this example:
Could anyone confirm that password hints for drives encrypted with Disk Utility
are saved on the local computer and do not show on different drives, ideally with a reference?
And in which cases do encrypted drives store their hints, as in the startup disk example above?
Update: I am running macOS 10.14.6
. Here is a screenshot of the drive encrypted with Disk Utility
that does not show a hint:
I believe that I chose MacOS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)
as the format in Disk Utility.app
for the drives that do not show a hint. Here is the result of diskutil list
with the two drives connected, one that shows a hint and is decrypted, the other that does not show a hint and is locked:
$ diskutil list /dev/disk0 (internal, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 121.1 GB disk0s2 /dev/disk1 (synthesized): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: APFS Container Scheme - +121.1 GB disk1 Physical Store disk0s2 1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 105.0 GB disk1s1 2: APFS Volume Preboot 45.5 MB disk1s2 3: APFS Volume Recovery 510.4 MB disk1s3 4: APFS Volume VM 2.1 GB disk1s4 /dev/disk2 (external, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *240.1 GB disk2 1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_CoreStorage Time Machine Encryped 239.7 GB disk2s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk2s3 Offline Logical Volume Time Machine Encryped on disk2s2 2930C7CC-4EE4-43AB-B1FB-81756A1CC0E5 Locked Encrypted