Hacker News Reader

My system triple boots into OS X, Windows and Ubuntu. I have a home partition, formatted in HFS+.

What would be the best strategy for me to use? Should I just encrypt the home volume using something cross-platform like TrueCrypt, or is it practical (an maintainable) to do full-disk encryption in such an environment?

My home partition has very sensitive data and I've been putting off creating a TrueCrypt container for this data.

View on HN

This is probably not answering your question but a possible solution is to switch to using OSX 100% of the time and then use Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox to virtualize Windows and Ubuntu. It's much more practical than having to worry about partitions / boot volumes and general sharing problems. This way you can even encrypt your entire OS X volume and not use encryption on the VMs.

I'm also dual booting OS X and Ubuntu with a shared home partition formatted as HFS+. Getting the encryption to work nicely in Linux sounded pretty easy, but I couldn't figure out how to do it in OS X. My current solution is to store anything particularly sensitive in a TrueCrypt file...obviously not the best solution.

Out of personal interest: Did you get Linux to mount the HFS+ partition with R/W access with journaling enabled? I am also curious if you make any progress with encrypting the entire partition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com