Panther FileVault limitation!!

[solrac]

Apparently your home folder can not be more than half the size of your hard drive, or it can't be encrypted. FileVault needs to make a copy of your entire home folder to start encrypting! (Or something like that.) Why is this? Why can't it encrypt what's there, without making a copy? Why does it work that way?

 

[Cat]

Well, under Jaguar you could make encrypted DiskImages ... and that's the way FileVault works AFAIK. It makes and encrypted "disk image" of your Home directory: this means it makes a full-blown copy of your Home. If your Home is >50% of the disk, the copy obviously won't fit ... after making the encrypted copy the original is thrown away, so you won't lose disk space permanently, but the encryption process requires double your Home dir's size.

 

[Pengu]

Surely you could use fresh install, turn on FileVault, when it's done, add your user files back to it. Presumably the disk image automatically resizes to fit new data??

 

[spitty27]

Surely you could use fresh install, turn on FileVault, when it's done, add your user files back to it. Presumably the disk image automatically resizes to fit new data??

exactly what i did! only before you suggested it

i had that two weeks ago but then my comp started getting laggy, and the "would you like to save disk space" message after every logout and restart message was getting annoying, so i turned it off. filevault took 40 seconds to encrypt after a clean install, and 1 hour to decrypt about 5gbs worth. read the sig for the computer specs.