filevault taking forever

shampoo · Aug 19th, 2009, 08:17 AM

Hi,

I turned on filevault and stupidly chose "secure delete". 36hrs later and she's still going! It's not dead because I can hear the disk spinning and the caps lock key responds.

I don't dare reboot it. I don't have another account on that machine so if I do reboot it and my homedir is hosed, I might be foobared. I do have lots of backups though.

My homedir is about 60 gigs. Anyone have any idea how long this can take ?

Thanks

J

chas_m · Aug 19th, 2009, 09:01 AM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by shampoo
	I turned on filevault and stupidly chose "secure delete". 36hrs later and she's still going! It's not dead because I can hear the disk spinning and the caps lock key responds. I don't dare reboot it. My homedir is about 60 gigs. Anyone have any idea how long this can take ?

My experience with this would indicate that you probably have another 36 hours ahead of you. Unless you are working for the CIA or the Illuminati, both turning on FV in the first place AND choosing "secure delete" was another classic example of complete paranoia security overkill. Lesson learned, I hope.

shampoo · Aug 19th, 2009, 09:04 AM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by chas_m
	My experience with this would indicate that you probably have another 36 hours ahead of you. Unless you are working for the CIA or the Illuminati, both turning on FV in the first place AND choosing "secure delete" was another classic example of complete paranoia security overkill. Lesson learned, I hope.

Thanks for your opinion.

LOL.

eMacMan · Aug 19th, 2009, 09:23 AM

Hopefully you cloned before attempting this experiment. Just let things run their course even if it takes the rest of the week. Otherwise you do risk data loss.

Too late for you but maybe others can learn from your experience. It's been several months at least so a quick review of when it is appropriate to use FileVault. Basically the answer is never. Or another way to put it is; Only use FileVault if securing the data is more important than the data itself.

FileVault is capable of causing far too many problems. Forget your password? Forget your data! Not only that but sometimes Filevault will forget your password for you! If you examine your home directory there is probably very little that actually needs to be protected. To subject every iTune/movie and photo to on the fly encryption and decryption is an ideal way to make the Mac experience reminiscent of running an old Windoze box.

Better bet is to use the built-in DiskUtility to create an encrypted Read/Write disk image. Keep your banking info and that novel you are writing stored there. Everything else can be kept where it belongs, which is probably right where it started.

shampoo · Aug 19th, 2009, 09:38 AM

So far the only problem I am having is that this is taking forever. I chose secure delete which has to securely wipe each bit. This obviously takes a long time.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have chosen this. But having said that, it would have been better off if I got some kind of warning "choosing this will significantly increase time to completion"..

I've also read in various places that I can reboot my machine. The encryption has taken place. What is left is to securely delete my old home dir. I'll let it run for another day or two and then take my chances..

As for why I decided to enable filevault, I'll leave that for another thread that has yet to be posted. ;-)