FileVault / DiskCorruption

Question

i think about turning on FileVault on my machine, but i'm concerned about dataloss. I often do video-skype and for some reason video-skyping locks up my computer every once in a while and i have to do a hard reset.

Are there any new experiences about FileVault in SnowLeopard + Disk Corruption?

Answer 1

File system corruption

FileVault 1 in Snow Leopard and Lion should be fine, provided you:

• maintain file system journaling for both your startup volume and your home directory
• have the .sparsebundle for your home on an internal disk.

If a sparse bundle disk image is on an external disk drive, there may be increased risk of file system corruption that is not resolved by journaling alone.

Forced stops, forced restarts

Pressing and holding the power key to force a stop may be unnecessarily harsh.

If that's your habit when experiencing problems associated with Skype, consider a less harsh alternative — forced restart:

• control⌘⏏ or control⌘power

Answer 2

FileVault can cause issues under heavy load (particularly disk load) or issues on older machines. Doesn't sound like your scenario would cause a problem to either however.

Answer 3

I had similar to what you describe issues with FileVault under Leopard, as well as the long-lived bug that all defaults would be unset after rebooting. All issues that I've had with FileVault have been solved with Snow Leopard.

You should be just fine in your situation. The locking and resetting issue is happening without FileVault enabled already, so there's no reason to assume that it is relevant to FileVault being on or off.