FileVault question: backups?

G

gator

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If you use FileVault to encrypt your home directory, are the files encrypted individually or will there be some kind of encrypted disk containing all files?

Imagine I make a change to a document in my home directory. If I would now make a backup, where only changed files are backed up will now my entire home directory be backed up or just the changed file? I use psync for backup.

Related, if the backup is performed by root, while I am logged in as normal user and thus have access to my encrypted home directory, will the root backup process use the encrypted or the non-encrypted data to backup?

Of course I can find out myself when I get Jaguar, but that will be another two weeks. Hopefully someone will satisfy my curiosity ...
 
Originally posted by gator
Of course I can find out myself when I get Jaguar, but that will be another two weeks. Hopefully someone will satisfy my curiosity ...
Click to expand...
I believe you mean Panther... ;) :D :cool:
 
FileVault takes your entire home directory and encrypts it into a sparse disk image. Individual files are not encrypted. You can double click the disk image belonging to some other user and mount it if you know the password.
 
In practice this means that I'll probably need to move my pictures and music folder to some other location. To prevent backup problems.

I'm a little surprised, I guess you could already do this with an encrypted disk image in Jaguar.

Thanks for the info!
 
No, it's not really a new thing, but I believe it mounts your ~/ directory from the disk image, which I don't think you could do before without a lot of hacking around in the system.
 
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