In my
last blog entry I have written about some problems I have had with FileVault because of having to less free disk space left. After that experience I found lots of comments reporting problems all related to FileVault. Hence I decided to turn off FileVault and use encrypted container files instead. Again lack of free disk space turned out to be a problem. Right after I triggered the decryption of my home directory by pushing the "Turn off FileVault" button I was prompted to free some disk space, namely almost 100 GB!!! This is the amount of free space the decryption process needs while turning off FileVault. Quite a lot, considering that the size of the whole hard drive is 250GB. Hence, I recommend to think twice before turning on FileVault.
Just a couple of days I have had a pretty anoying experience regarding File Vault. I have been working on a virtual machine within Paralles, when all of a sudden the machine paused with a pop-up window. It said something about too less space left on the hard drive and I should delete some files in order to continue, or then switch off the virtual machine. Thus I started deleting some bigger files. But still same pop-up appears and by the way it told me the amount of space left on my hard drive, which did not change, even though I deleted few GB of data. Hence I had no option and had to shut down the virtual machine without being able to save my work I have had done so far. The problem here: File Vault does not free space before you log out. Right after logging in again, the disk space was deallocated and I was able to continue my work. Even though I only lost work of the last half an hour before that happening, it was pretty annoying anyway...
