Do Not Enable File Vault

donnydonny
Posted:
in macOS edited April 2015
I have traced my various problems with Panther (wow...you just wouldn't believe...) to using File Vault. No problem will be evident until you restart your computer 1-5 times (depending on how much data is being swapped around on your hard drive), but at one of these points, you will restart your machine to see that your preferences are scambled to h*ll and back. My guess is that somehow, while encrypting data on the fly, File Vault causes the file system to lose track of the placement of the data, and/or this proccess corrupts the data to the point the system or a program resets itself. I know several people are talking about problems with it. If you are experiencing problems with your new install, I suggest checking File Vault first. If it is not enabled, your problem obviously stems from something else. I spoke with Apple support tonight about this issue. Unfortunately, they are clueless. It seems no one at Apple support has really used File Vault at all. I got switched to 4 different people. Finally this wonderful lady said she would get a team on it, and she'd call me back on the issue. I find it amazing that "technical specialist" (as they termed the last two people speaking to me) had no idea about File Vault from never using it. I even had one guy argue with me that File Vault issues a dialogue box after restarting or shutting down a machine that prompts the user to regain lost data from the use of File Vault. Do not hit continue, by the way, for it only makes matters worse. Anyone else find what I'm saying to be true? Hope I caught, at least, some people in time to help.



Sorry for any grammatical or other mistakes. I'm trying to get this posted ASAP.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 22
    stevesteve Posts: 523member
    Too late.
  • Reply 2 of 22
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    I'm sorry....



    I just confirmed that File Vault is the problem, too, unfortunately. After turning File Vault off, my system is in top notch shape with no shifting or deleting of preferences. It took me forever to be able to turn it off and restart my Mac. Fortunately, I found no data loss with all my problems with File Vault (aside from prefernces, of course), and I believe, after days of fighting with it, any data loss problems would be apparent to me at this point. However, I was very careful when messing with it; so I'm not trying to promise anything. Besides, my computer has been unsuable for the entire day. So it causes enough problems in and of itself. Now, I'm off to reset all my passwords....grrrr....
  • Reply 3 of 22
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    Interesting... My observation gets almost zero response here, yet it is getting one rolling over on Apple's discussion forum here:



    http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]





    I guess most of you guys do not care or wanted to stay away from it.
  • Reply 4 of 22
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    Umm I am sorry for your problem.



    Satisfied?
  • Reply 5 of 22
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Anders

    Umm I am sorry for your problem.



    Satisfied?



    Sorry Donny, but
  • Reply 6 of 22
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    *smirks* you guys are great...



    I did not have major problems with this issue, personally. I found problems in Panther and sought to troubleshoot and isolate the issues. It has to be File Vault.



    I was hoping people who have been shafted by it might share their experiences to gain further insight into what is going on here. WTF? Is this not a discussion group? Would you guys not like to help each other?



    I care about people losing their projects and other data. Excuse me for trying to give a heads up on a potentially devastating problem.
  • Reply 7 of 22
    the generalthe general Posts: 649member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Donny

    *smirks* you guys are great...



    I did not have major problems with this issue, personally. I found problems in Panther and sought to troubleshoot and isolate the issues. It has to be File Vault.



    I was hoping people who have been shafted by it might share their experiences to gain further insight into what is going on here. WTF? Is this not a discussion group? Would you guys not like to help each other?



    I care about people losing their projects and other data. Excuse me for trying to give a heads up on a potentially devastating problem.



    Could it be that maybe no one here was shafted and it is not that they just dont want to talk to you? I used filevault up until yesterday, since I installed on friday, and had 0 problems, none at all, I turned it off just because I had no use for it personally.
  • Reply 8 of 22
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    Right... I'm taking all of this personally, and my feelings are hurt now. I think I'll type a response while I cry here...



    Thanks for the informations. Was that hard for you? Now a question... Did you restart you computer a lot over the period you had File Vault enabled on it? Did you allow it to recover unused portions of your home folder a few times? If not... I expect you to have experienced no problems whatsoever. If you did and had no problems... then I'm interested, since it does not seems to happen. Glad you got it off without a hitch.
  • Reply 9 of 22
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    0) It was a joke.



    1) I am sorry for you. I never lie. Its just that its perfectly possible to care without expressing it all the time.



    2) I would never ever EVER enable something FileVault before it had gone through real live test for at least half a year. The very thought of encrypting all my stuff and rely on an OS (no matter how much it is build on Unix) to decrypt it for me close to very stupid. The very minute I heard Jobs introduce this on stage I had knew the AppleCare pages would be filled with people that could not get access to their stuff after enableing it. And besides my paper on the sociological implication of having jurors present in the legal system isn´t so high class top secret knowledge that it needs to be kept out of evildoers hands. So I simply don´t have any experience with FileVault.
  • Reply 10 of 22
    fuzz_ballfuzz_ball Posts: 390member
    Nope, I got shafted. In addition to preferences getting hosed twice (didn't realize the first time was due to filevault), the coup de grace was the random trashing of several of my files, including my VPC virtual drive that I *need* in order to work at my office. Luckily I recently got a FW drive and had somewhat recent backups of everything (phew!)



    I won't touch that POS feature for a long time...not until Apple fixes it and I hear you guys have been using it for 6 months+ (someone elses turn to play guinea pig )
  • Reply 11 of 22
    zapchudzapchud Posts: 844member
    I got shafted too!



    And still recovering.



    Stupid!
  • Reply 12 of 22
    mmmpiemmmpie Posts: 628member
    Ive already replied to a thread on this issue. The lost prefs are a symptom that your disk is full ( within a few hundred megs ).



    The thing about encryption is that it typically increases the amount of data, a lot. So if you encrypt your mp3 collection you are going to blow out file vault, and loose your prefs.



    Apple should have fixed this issue by now, not only is it crap, but there is no warning, and no indication as to the fault. I can easily imagine users who fill up their disks, and then just never use their Mac again, cos it always forgets their email settings etc.
  • Reply 13 of 22
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Yup, it's a problem with the virtual memory manager and the apps not collaborating on when space gets low. I've seen this plenty...



    The reason your prefs/files are getting trashed is because *there's no room left* on your drive by the time they need to be written. Why? Because VM has gobbled it up. I *never* run my machines with less than a full GB of disk space free. If it drops below 700MB or so, I quit all apps one by one and restart.



    I had this happen a lot before I figured out I needed to archive some files.... and this was on 10.1. It's an old problem.



    How much free space do you guys happen to have?
  • Reply 14 of 22
    donnydonny Posts: 231member
    Hmmm... Are you referring to the remaining capacity of the disk image File Vault creates or the overall space for the HD? My HD is 40 GB and had 30 GB remaining on it. I have no idea about the capacity of the disk image from File Vault, but it did wish to reclaim space constantly.
  • Reply 15 of 22
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    Yea, file vault sucks. I turned it on and boom...all my preferences were gone, nowhere to be found. I had to turn it off and try about 100 different things to try and fix it. Eventually ya'll pointed me toward a command line fix that worked like a charm. It turns out that file vault changes all of your files and folders so the system owns them. I had to take back the ownership using a command line in the terminal. File vault is no good from what I've seen. If your interested, here is a link to the thread that I started: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...t=Big+Problems
  • Reply 16 of 22
    johnhenryjohnhenry Posts: 152member
    My system was hosed the day after installing panther. I'm not sure but after turning on file vault and restarting, each time it would say filevault was using too much room and asked if i would like to recover that room. I clicked yes and the second time this happened, various things were messed. iTunes would not launch, bookmarks gone, keychain wouldnt hold passwords etc. I did a fresh install and did NOT enable file vault. No problems so far...



    I have about 50 gb left on an 80 gb HD, so space is plentiful. Anyway, how in the heck did this make release? Cripes, I switched to the mac so I could get away from windows monkey buisiness like this but it seems this stuff happens anyway.
  • Reply 17 of 22
    kecksykecksy Posts: 1,002member
    Well, I just reinstalled Panther after expierencing some wierd bugs. I didn't enable FileVault this time, and it's been smooth sailing so far, except escapepod seems broken on my machine. Keeps crashing
  • Reply 18 of 22
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Donny

    Hmmm... Are you referring to the remaining capacity of the disk image File Vault creates or the overall space for the HD? My HD is 40 GB and had 30 GB remaining on it. I have no idea about the capacity of the disk image from File Vault, but it did wish to reclaim space constantly.



    I meant the drive, but that's a really good point - FV makes a disk image, and is constantly trying to reduce the size down to the 'optimal' and minimum needed.



    If it's paring it back too far, and making it to small, then it'd show the same behaviour as if your drive were almost full, and blammo. Lost prefs.
  • Reply 19 of 22
    big macbig mac Posts: 480member
    FileVault sounded like a nightmare from its inception. How could Apple possibly think encrypting an entire home user folder work? Don't the engineers realize that one's home folder is far too large to be effectively encrypted/decrypted on demand? I have nothing of great import on my iBook, but my home folder is 3.4GBs. Anyone doing anything remotely disk space intensive shouldn't get anywhere near this feature. Sigh. Filevault, along with the horrendous firewire maladies, is really making Panther seem like a dog. If Apple hopes to regain market share, this definitely isn't the way to do it.
  • Reply 20 of 22
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    I'd turn it off, but I don't have enough disk space - 20 GB free on my 60GB drive.







    At least I'm safe... all this data is backed up to my other machine, I just have to delete all of my data, turn it off, then FW it over again. But damn, what a time consuming hassle.



    Or maybe I'll restart a few dozen times and see this for myself.
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