Filevault & Firewire drives

[rtfm]

Can you extend Filevault encryption to external drives? I've Googled around but not hit anything helpful...

[JDV]

I think FileVault just encrypts your home directory. You can use an encrypted disk image for external drives if you choose.

Joe VanZandt

[rtfm]

Quote: You can use an encrypted disk image for external drives if you choose.

Hmm, had not thought of that. I guess that will read/write normally, but I've never done that....

[displaced]

Quote: Originally Posted by rtfm Hmm, had not thought of that. I guess that will read/write normally, but I've never done that....

Well, other than the fact you're creating the image manually in Disk Utility, it's identical to FileVault.

FileVault stores your home folder in an encrypted disk image and handles the mounting and unmounting of that image at login/logout, as well as some tricks to make it transparent in normal use.

[rtfm]

Quote: Originally Posted by displaced Well, other than the fact you're creating the image manually in Disk Utility, it's identical to FileVault.

A somewhat clueless question. I spent some time screwing around with a mounted external drive, DiskUtility and such, without seeing what may be obvious.. (But then I didn't want to erase the external drive quite yet...)

How do I create a full-drive encrypted partition?

[displaced]

As far as I know, it's a case of just making an encrypted disk image file that's as large as possible on the external drive!

This is a bit messy, since you'd have two icons on your desktop - one for the drive itself and then one for the actual image. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that any aliases you make to items on the encrypted image will automatically cause the encrypted volume to be mounted when opened. OS X will prompt you for the password unless you've added it to your keychain.

You can probably work around this though. Firstly, you could use a tool such as Do Something When to automatically mount the image file when the host drive is mounted. Then, you can use one of the numerous hints on this site to hide the host drive's icon on the desktop.

As far as I know, there's no in-built support for encrypted partitions/filesystems in OS X at present, although someone may well know otherwise!