[devilla101]

Tried searching forums for relative topic but to no avail.

I have a 200GB External hdd I divided into 2 partitions. One volume is to backup my ibook hdd and the other volume for misc. stuff.

How would I be able to protect the data in it, if ever my place was broken into and it was stolen?

I know Filevault can secure the Home folder in the internal hdd but no idea if it secures the external HDD as well?

Ibook specs are

ibook 1GHZ
512 RAM
40gb HDD
Tiger
200GB External Firewire/USB2

Any ideas short of buying a safe and locking it up everytime I leave the house?

Thanks

[TETENAL]

FileVault does secure your home directory only, but not your external HD or anything outside your home folder (this includes the backup – it's not encrypted).

You can create an encrypted disk image on your external HD with Disk Utility.

[madmacgames]

if you use a backup software to automate or help in your backup process, you might check its prefs. Most will have an option to encrypt the backup.

[devilla101]

Originally Posted by madmacgames

if you use a backup software to automate or help in your backup process, you might check its prefs. Most will have an option to encrypt the backup.

Well I use DejaVu as my back up software. Not too sure if it has security options though.

Does anyone else know a good backup software that has security options with it?

[madmacgames]

I know both Babel's Impression and Dantz's Retrospect have encryption capabilities for backups. I don't know what Retrospect is like. I do use Impression and find it works quite well for my needs.

You could also follow TETENAL's advise and create a sparse disk image on the external drive that is encrypted. And then save the backups to there. Though, I'm not sure how well that would work in practice for automated backups. I believe you'd have to always have the encrypted image mounted in order for Deja Vu to be able to backup to it.

[CatOne]

Encrypted disk image. You can create it via disk utility.

[outsourced]

This looks interesting:
http://www.ioraid.com/

[Nivag]

not really securing the data, but the Lacie D2 drives have the capability of being locked with a Kensington lock.

if you used Retrospect you have your backup data secured with a password.

[jhogarty]

Have you considered PGP: PGP Desktop

I have used this on Windows (2000/XP) and need to upgrade to the Mac OS X version. If it is the same on OS X, you create a "virtual disk" and can mount it when you need it. The disk is actually a PGP file and I believe 128bit strong encryption. You will need to enter a password to mount the file.

J.

{edit}Didn't realize they now charging $99 for the software.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by jhogarty

Have you considered PGP: PGP Desktop

I have used this on Windows (2000/XP) and need to upgrade to the Mac OS X version. If it is the same on OS X, you create a "virtual disk" and can mount it when you need it. The disk is actually a PGP file and I believe 128bit strong encryption. You will need to enter a password to mount the file.

J.

{edit}Didn't realize they now charging $99 for the software.

Why the hell would you use that when you can just use an encrypted disk image, which has been available, native to, and supported in, the OS, for free, for years?!

[jhogarty]

Why? Because I recently switched to the Mac and didn't know it exists. There are alot of things I'm learning. I used PGP (for the disk and email utils) on the PC. I am familiar with, so that is why I posted. Now I see that the disk part is included, I'll check it out.

J.

[jhogarty]

CatOne - I researched and tested your suggestion about using the built-in encryption of OS X. One issue I can't seem to resolve is disk size. With PGP I can specifiy say a 600MB file to be a virtual disk. Perhaps you can provide some guidance on how to accomplish this with the built-in tools of OS X?

I was able to see how to make the contents of a folder into a disk image and encrypt it. Very useful.

J.

[TETENAL]

Disk Utility->File->New empty image

In the dialog there you can specify the size of the disk image. If you choose sparse disk image type this is the maximum size (the image will automatically grow as needed up to this size – shrinking requires a Terminal command).

[jhogarty]

SWEEET! Thanks.

J.