stepsahead

Q: Question about safety of local icloud folders

Hi,

 

If one day, i am very unlucky and if my computer gets stolen, the thieves can take out the Hard Drive and connect it to the Sata reader. If this person connect this Sata Interface to a macintosh, will he be able to read all my files that are locally stored in my Icloud drives?

 

In Fact, i have seen that the permissions of folders in Icloud are set to EVERYONE = READ.

 

I can switch all the folders to Everyone : No access. Will it provide me safety? or the only solution would be to encrypt my whole hard drive.

 

I say it so because i do photocopy of my credit cards and personal papers that i copied on my Icloud drive.

 

All of your thoughts are welcome.

 

Thank you.

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), 16Gb

Posted on Mar 25, 2015 5:39 PM

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Q: Question about safety of local icloud folders

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  • by stepsahead,Solvedanswer

    stepsahead stepsahead Mar 25, 2015 6:17 PM in response to stepsahead
    Level 1 (13 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 25, 2015 6:17 PM in response to stepsahead

    Just thinking about it, i have found a solution for encryption but it is not with Icloud. I also use OneDrive.

    So, i have created a 50gb partition with the Disk Utility at the end of my Hard Drive. I called it Vault.

    I then ran terminal and i enabled filevault on it using

    diskutil cs convert /Volumes/Vault -passphrase 'mypassword'

    Then i restarted, it prompted me from the password and asked me to add it my Keychain, which i did.

    Then i pointed Onedrive to use this partition to copy my OneDrive contents to this encrypted partition.

  • by Barney-15E,

    Barney-15E Barney-15E Mar 26, 2015 3:42 AM in response to stepsahead
    Level 9 (50,379 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 26, 2015 3:42 AM in response to stepsahead

    stepsahead wrote:

     

    Hi,

     

    If one day, i am very unlucky and if my computer gets stolen, the thieves can take out the Hard Drive and connect it to the Sata reader. If this person connect this Sata Interface to a macintosh, will he be able to read all my files that are locally stored in my Icloud drives?

     

    In Fact, i have seen that the permissions of folders in Icloud are set to EVERYONE = READ.

     

    I can switch all the folders to Everyone : No access. Will it provide me safety? or the only solution would be to encrypt my whole hard drive.

    Yes. Encryption is the only safety net for that scenario.

    Everyone read doesn't mean what you think it does. Everyone is any user in the OS that isn't the file's owner or a member of the group to which the file belongs.

    Those permissions are a file system management tool, not security. While operating within the confines of a Unix operating system, those permissions can control access to the files, but once the drive is removed from those confines as you describe, they do little to nothing.

     

    If those files are the only thing you are concerned with, you could create an encrypted disk image to store those files. When you "eject" the mounted image, the file is encrypted and nobody can get into them no matter where they are stored.

    How to create a password-protected (encrypted) disk image - Apple Support

    Pay attention at step 10. You must deselect storing in your keychain as that will open the file anytime you are logged in. So, you wouldn't want that stored in the keychain, and you'd want it different than your login password.