Nov 10, '03 10:53:00AM • Contributed by: ihelp-mac
Switched on, FileVault was progressively gobbling up all the free space on the partition, and then iTunes would start to choke, corrupting it's XML database files in its attempt to save the settings. Until I figured this out, it rapidly got to the point that relaunching iTunes, after rebooting the computer, would give a message "cannot launch iTunes, settings file is not an iTunes document." This totally trashed my music-playlists. Finally an error message saying I only had 350kb of freespace on my boot drive forced me to logout, and then File Vault issued an error message saying that it had to "recover" freespace on the drive before logout could continue.
Solution (for now, and it seems to be stable through several restarts) is to turn off File Vault, then restart (and this "rescavenges" and frees up the HD space wasted by whatever File Vault is doing "in the background"). File Vault was wasting nearly 4gb of space, whatever else it was doing. The pricetag for this fix is the necessity of rebuilding my entire playlist after trashing my corrupted (well, now totally unusable by iTunes) playlist .XML data files, and restarting iTunes. So, unless you have a BACKUP offline of your iTunes database files, do NOT switch on FileVault.
[robg adds: There have been enough reported problems with File Vault that I strongly recommend it not be used until Apple has addressed the issue in some manner. Personally, I don't think I'll ever trust having my essential files scrambled on my hard drive -- it just seems to be inviting disaster, either through my failure to remember a key password, or a minor system glitch rendering the whole thing non-decodable ... but that's just me, and I know this feature is potentially very valuable to those who travel often with laptops ... but until Apple has fixed it, I'd recommend turning it off.]
