FileVault and low hard drive space warning.

[Captain Sulu]

Hi folks, I've got a 1.2Ghz iBook running Tiger (10.4.8) with FileVault switched on for all users. The comp only has a 28 Gig HD and I've only got 24 meg free, consequently, I'm repeatedly getting the 'your HD is low on drive space' message. To rectify this I deleted about 3 or 4 Gig of stuff I'm not using. However, the computer is not recognising this newly cleared space.

I've noticed in the past that when large amounts of data is deleted FileVault recognises this and resizes the users home directory for encryption (or at least that's what I think it does). Problem is, I'm still getting the HD is full message and I can't install some new programs because filevault is not recognising the newly freed space and doing it's usual thing.

Anyone know how I can get around this?

I tried switching FileVault off but this was not possible as I needed 2.5 gig of free HD space to complete this process. Why isn't FV resizing itself?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!
Chris

 

[fryke]

FileVault is a problem, not a solution, seriously. Get a big external FireWire harddrive, backup everything from every user, reinstall Mac OS X and bring everything back _without_ turning FileVault on. If anything has to be secured, the users should create secure disk images for those specific files. FileVault doesn't work - period. (Or rather: Problems such as yours turn up far too frequently. I guess it _would_ work if you had a 2 TB disk and only needed 5 MB per user, if the number of users doesn't exceed, say, 5.)