My main account's home folder (Filevault protected) has recently become corrupted when I try to log in. When I login to a second admin account and link up with TM, I can't find my sparsebundle file. I can see the folder but there is a red tick and when I try to click it won't allow me to try to enter a password, just says "you do not have access to this file". Any ideas? Thanks all
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
Uhm, that makes good sense as one user is not permitted to access the files of another user... otherwise this whole user/permission thing wouldn't make sense...
I understand this but I know the password so my question is how do I access it from a different user account? I know the password it is encrypted under. I am most likely going to reinstall ML but I want to make sure some important files were backed up correctly first
You'd have the chance to migrate the user account and data with the Migration Assistant (e.g. once you restore after re-installation), or you could access it with Time Machine from the user account.
I can't get into the user account because it is corrupted (my assumption is a kernel panic, cpu froze so I had to force it to shut down and once restarted could not log in)
Can you boot from the backup drive?
Do you have another computer with which you could connect to the Mac and either use Target Disk Mode or network functionality to access the files in the account?
If you mean boot from TM, then no. I have a flash drive with Lion on it which I can boot from.
Unless you have a compelling reason, you shouldn't be using legacy FileVault under ML, especially not if you rely on Time Machine for backups. Use the working admin account to deactivate FV for the other account. Delete the sparsebundle of the non-working account (the original, not the backups.)
You should then be able to log in to the affected account. Activate FileVault 2 if you so choose. Restore the sparsebundle to a new location, such as the Desktop. Mount it and copy the files. If it won't mount, restore an older snapshot. The sparsebundle was only backed up when you logged out. You may have lost some data.
Filevault & TM
