FileVault Recovering Excess Space
When I log out (not always, but most of the time) I get a message box saying that FileVault has determined that my home directory is unsing more space than is required and it will recover that space. There are skip and continue buttons. What is this all about? And how do I set it to default one way or the other?
Comments
Originally posted by fulmer
When I log out (not always, but most of the time) I get a message box saying that FileVault has determined that my home directory is unsing more space than is required and it will recover that space. There are skip and continue buttons. What is this all about? And how do I set it to default one way or the other?
FileVault works on encrypted disk images which are a bit different than ordinary disk images. For performance and security reasons, FileVault has to do some disk access a bit different than the ordinary file system layer.
Since disk images are files that contain a file system, they cannot easily grow and shrink like eg. Photoshop files. Disk images can grow, but if you delete a file in the middle, you effectively create a hole which could be reclaimed either by recreating the filesystem organization inside the disk image (possibility of data loss if something goes wrong) or by recreatingn the whole image. Since the whole information has to be decrypted and recrypted, a hiccup occurs and the system stalles for some seconds if you try to write a file.
To ameliorate this, Apple chose to mark the deleted files as deleted inside the image without rewriting the image file. This is done on logout, hence the dialog asking you if you wish to consolidate the image file.
Originally posted by Donny
Sounds like a reasonable explanation of it. I'm not sure what it is doing, myself. I have noticed the same box when I shut down or start up my machine, time to time. I did it the first time. My prefs were shot and my system went crazy... never happened to me before on OS X of any version. It may not be connected, but I skipped it the next time.
I had some funky things happen the first time I installed 10.3 but I thought it had to do with Norton Systemworks 2.0 or something else. Now that I think of it, the funkyness happened right after I did the "recover space" .... maybe they are related, maybe not....
I wiped/reloaded the system again with out any extra system software (Systemworks, HP All-In-One software, etc...) only the basic apps. I then added Office X and the updated all the patches up to 15, then Macromedia Studio MX (origional ver not 2004) and some others. Havent had any funkyness lately, but I still get the "recover space" message box everytime I logout...
I'd like a checkbox or something that would say "yes, always recover" or "no, never recover" or something... I usually forget that it's going to pop up. I press the restart/shutdown button, then leave the computer only to come back later and find that it's still waiting for me to decide what to do.
on closeStack
domenu "Compact stack"
end closeStack
not the first time Apple's been a bit lax about automatically reclaiming free space
Amorya
PS-> I have let File Vault recover space again, and my system still seems OK.