Hard drive failed, FileVault prevents recovery!?

J

jvanv8

Registered
My Hard drive apparently became corrupt a few days ago and I was told that I need to replace the hard drive. The store attempted to extract the old data off the disk to place it onto the new disk but ran into problems because after 4 of 85Gb, it could not proceed (due to the corruption, perhaps(?)). They have informed me that they can not recover my data because I was using the encrypted FileVault feature. So there basically is just one image file that they can't seem to do much with.

Are they correct? Am I screwed?
Or, is there a way to use this image file to restore my data?

Thanks, John
 
If the image file is corrupted and they cannot copy it off then, most likely yes, you are screwed. If you had not encrypted the drive then they could at least have pulled off some of the other files that were not affected. Now technically it might be possible to take the partial image and decrypt it and then still pull some data out of it, but that is going to be very labor intensive and is beyond what I would expect a regular store to be able to do.

The thing to keep in mind is that with technology like FileVault you are making the assertion that the access to your data is more important than the data itself. This makes perfect sense in lots of cases, like a business laptop where you have everything backed up in the home office and it is more important that you protect a lost machine's data than recover that data in the event of a hard-drive failure like you experienced.

FileVault is great technology but it almost should not be available to the average Joe, because their data values are almost 180 degrees out of synch with FileVault's ideal user. They don't have backups, they would be desperate to recover even a sliver of it and even though you might feel a bit embarrassed to thing that someone could read your email, it really is no big deal in a greater sense.
 
its really only 5 mission critical business files that I need, I could care less about my personal files or email.
 
(I still don't quite get how Apple *ever* could think it would be a great idea to promote FileVault...)

It doesn't matter whether you only need 5 files or all of them. It's _one_ file they have to rescue: The entire FileVault image. Unless that can be fully restored to its previous state, it can't be mounted and nothing can be retrieved. Since it _was_ encrypted, there's not really much chance to find anything _within_ the corrupted image, because *everything* will look like garbage. You don't know where one file within the image would begin and where another would end. For example, take my message and sort its characters alphabetically. Then corrupt the text by taking out one of each characters and give that to someone to try puzzling together one sentence of it without knowing exactly what it meant.
 
fryke said:
(I still don't quite get how Apple *ever* could think it would be a great idea to promote FileVault...)
Click to expand...

Like I said, I can only come up with one good use case where it works, and that is basically an I-am-taking-sensitive-data-out-of-the-company-to-use-elsewhere scenario. If you are doing anything else, especially if you are creating the valuable data on your machine, FileVault should be beaten away under all conditions.

For instance, I bet the US Veteran's Administration wishes that they used FileVault to protect the social security numbers they recently lost due to a laptop theft. The comparable loss of labor to Joe Blow not being able to recover that report he wrote over the weekend is miniscule.
 
I know it doesn't matter if its 1 file or 1 million files, just thought I would mention why it was originally encrypted for protection (and not because I thought someone would read my inbox about how I wrote a letter saying Tommy and Suzy are going to hook-up after study hall). :D

Anyway, I found this article:
http://toxicsoftware.com/blog/filevault_corruption/
which I will try when I get the machine tomorrow... hope it works as well for me as it did for him!
I could use any additional pointers if anyone wants to add to that article/blog entry.
 
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