I’m finally back online with my imac!

Finally found the time to do anything personal! My imac had been repaired a week ago but work was still very heavy and any free time I had was spent making changes to the way I stored data on my imac. You see, like everyone, I had stored all my data all over the place on my imac and when it it developed some problem I had to bring it back to the apple shop. This posed a number of problems, because I didn’t want the apple staff or anyone else going through my personal data so I copied all the data from my imac to an external harddisk and the deleted them from the imac.

Once I got the imac back, I decided to centralized all my data into a truecrypt drive making backup and security very easy, if I want to backup my data, I simply copied the truecrypt container along with all my data in one step, instead of looking for them all over (in docs, in photos, and etc). This also has the main benefit of ensuring that even if my computer were stolen, they couldn’t get to any of my personal info because it would be encrypted. This truecrypt archive is mounted at all times and programmed it in such a way that whenever the imac rebooted, it would ask for the password in order to mount the truecrypt container. So if they would to steal my computer, they would need to unplug hence shutting it down and unmounting the container file. Though had this been a notebook, then I would have a problem with them just stealing the notebook and being able to access all my data since the truecrypt file would still be mounted.

This took a while to setup since I needed to reroute all path for programs into the truecrypt container instead. Hence why I haven’t made any updates even after getting back my imac as I was busy setting it up and ensuring it worked properly, this is especially true with rerouting all my folder locations for lightroom which was a pain in the ass to do correctly.

Now I am just working on editing the photos and etc. So yeah! This is one hell of a backlog >_<

UPDATE: I soon found out later that OS X has it’s owm built-in encrypt folder function called FileVault. It encrypts your home folder with your user password and its completely transparent. Also, if you’re apple computer goes to sleep, it will automatically lock it so anyone who steals it won’t be able to get the data even if they extracted the hard disk and use it on another computer or try to mount it as an external because the home folder is encrypted and decryption is handled in memory (*this of course has its own problems but unless you’re guarding top secret info, it will serve most conventional purposes).

So the point of the lesson? Explore your OS’s built in security else you might end up recreating the wheel again. Though FileVault has it’s drawback, it only encrypts the home folder and you cannot select the level of encryption but encryption and decryption is done seamlessly with only a small performance penalty but it’s the perfect solution for apple notebooks! Another advantage of FileVault over truecrypt is you don’t have to worry about space usage since FileVault is actually a sparse disk image that can grow and shrink. Although I think I’ll continue to use truecrypt for my imac since it’s already set up.

May 22, 2011 | Categories: blog, computer, rants | 3 Comments »