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Comment by tobiasbischoff | Hacker News Reader

On OSX with Lion - there is no excuse

http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-e...

Have you noticed crashes and general instability on OS X Lion + Filevault 2?

We've tried it on a Core2Duo Macbook Pro (early 2007) and MacBook (Mid 2010). We've seen lots of OS crashes (Macbook) and general performance issues when running XCode (Macbook Pro).

We're also running virtualization software on the Macs (Parallels and VMWare) - I'm not sure if they're interacting with Filevault 2 (shouldn't be).

Just wonder if anyone else has noticed this.

I use it on a 2011 Air and Mini without problems, and I'm just about always in Parallels on both machines.

I use Lion's Filevault 2 on an early 2009 MBP and have not had any crashes or stability problems at all. FV2 on Lion is light years ahead of the broken Filevault 1 (Snow Leopard) implementation.

no i have no problems. macbook air 2010 w/ lion + file vault active - no crashes or instability. i do time machine backups on a regular basis and work with Xcode, photoshop, iWork, vmware fusion - never had any problem.

Does it now play well with Time Machine?

I also let it encrypt the disks that Time Machine writes to. Works well.

Yeah, it's much cleaner vs. the old FileVault. The decryption happens at boot-time, as far as most of the OS is concerned (incl. TimeMachine) there's no encryption at all.

Combined with a firmware password, it makes a MacBook impenentrable.

Got a good pointer to setting a firmware password?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1352

Reboot your Mac into recovery mode (hold Cmd+R on bootup), its in one of the menus there.

I haven't been able to use Filevault with iTunes match ...

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16987224

Though I'd love to hear any reports to the contrary!

Filevault isn't supported by the major media editing apps. I travel a lot and rely on having a 'fake' account on my drive that I can login to if asked that has pretty much nothing on it.

you must be thinking of the original filevault that encrypted each user's home directory separately.

filevault 2 in lion is true full-disk encryption, and the passphrase must be entered at boot. once it is decrypted, no application should even be able to detect (or rather, care about) the presence of encryption.

Oh, great to know thanks. I haven't moved to lion yet because of app support.

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