jwz asks: “FileVault: good idea, or performance killer?” I’m not ready to turn my whole home directory over to FileVault, but I love using TrueCrypt on my Windows machines, so I figured I’d try putting some of my files on an encrypted sparse disk image.
It worked great, but then I left it mounted while I was trying to copy some files between FireWire drives, and my machine locked hard (it turns out I needed a firmware update for my Oxford 922-powered FireWire 800 drive).
Well, when I rebooted and tried to mount my disk image, I got “Disk image failed to mount/Corrupt image,” so I’m tossing this experiment down the drain (FWIW, I’ve put TrueCrypt through plenty of crashes, and it never has a problem). I’m glad I use Unison to keep my Mac in sync with several other computers at home, because restoring the files was quick and painless.
I would suggest Private Disk – though it is commercial – its Disk Firewall feature is a brilliant feature. (Creates a white-list of allowed applications – e.g. a filtering mechanism to additionally protect data from spyware and viruses). Here is the description of how disk firewall works – http://www.dekart.com/howto/howto_disk_encryption/disk_firewall/
But what did you expect? The system crashed, and you know that the cause of the crash was a different factor, why blame it on the program?
If there’s no ground beneath your feet, you will obviously fall down, and it’s not the fault of the manufacturer of the gyroscope
Ronnie,
I’m not blaming the crash on my mounting the disk image, but I do want the disk image to continue working after a crash. If a lockup or kernel panic is enough to corrupt a mounted disk image, I can’t put my critical files on it the way I’ve been able to do with TrueCrypt.
I should add that the disk image wasn’t on that firewire drives (I just happened to be copying some files between them at the time), so I can’t blame it on a hardware failure.
- Brian