If I use FileVault, and someone gets my computer, can they get into my files by using the Reset Password utility on the Mac OS X installation DVD?
iMac6,1 (Late 2006 iMac Intel), 3 GB RAM, 2.33 GHz Processor, 2 TB internal HD, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Minor GUI mods, a lot of stuff connected with FireWire or USB
Had FileVault finished encrypting the external disk, when you copied the 280GB file, and then reformatted it?
FileVault will encrypt an existing volume while you are still using it, by starting at the beginning of the disk and keeping a marker of where it is in the encryption process until it gets to the end of the disk. The ENTIRE DISK. It does not matter if you had no previous files on the disk, it will encrypt all of it, even if you are not currently using the data. And your writes to the disk would get priority over encryption, so while you were saturating the disk with your 280GB movie write, FileVault would have been waiting for you to finish.
Eventually, once the entire disk is encrypted, then your writes will go out encrypted, but during the initial encryption, it has to keep track of what is and what is not yet encrypted, and that is a simple, highwater mark as it progresses from the start to the end of the disk.
If FileVault was not finished encrypting, it may have not reached the point where your video was stored? Just a thought, as once the blocks are encrypted, they need to encryption key to decrypt.
If that's a long process, then probably not.
I thought that since there was no indication anything was happening, the volume was quickly encrypted as soon as I'd entered my password. The volume was blank, so I figured that was right. Then I thought that everything copied there would be encrypted on the fly.
At least that's what I was told by two different AppleCare reps Fri. & Sat.
They didn't say anything about the data being slowly encrypted after it had been copied there.
So I should go ahead and copy my files there, but allow plenty of time for the encryption process to finish?
How is one to know when it's finished? Obviously the drive doesn't refuse to be ejected and the OS doesn't give any notice that it's busy encrypting data.
BTW, the size of the video file was only 280 MB, not GB, I typed it wrong.
Yes it will be encrypted on the fly AFTER the disk is fully under FileVault. But you did not wait for that, you just jumped in and out raced the initial WHOLE disk encryption.
Again I ask: How will I know encryption is occurring and when it's finished?
I'd have thought the process would be using a large amount of CPU, but I rebooted and then started the process about 10 minutes ago and nothing is using over 7%. Nothing in the top 20 processes seems related to the disk at all, unless it's kernel_task, which is at the top.
And I am viewing All Processes.
The light on the drive shows activity, so apparently something is going on.
encryption is NOT CPU intensive. In fact all the recent intel chips include encryption support. The encryption will be I/O bound, and all priority will go to anyone else that wants to do I/O.
Encryption FINALLY finished!
It took about 12 hours to encrypt a blank 1 TB drive.
Part way in I wanted to turn on FileVault, not knowing that requires the computer to be rebooted, but the encryption process was running so I couldn't.
It took about 12 hours to encrypt a blank 1 TB drive.
The file system on top of the disk may have been empty, but every one of those 250 million 4096 byte blocks on the 1TB disk needed to be encrypted. FileVault is "Whole" Disk encryption, not file system encryption. FileVault does not know what is file system data and what is file system free space.
How Secure is FileVault?
