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What's the risk?
Authored by: stuwd on May 01, '09 05:16:03AM

[I was the original poster - it reads much better thanks to robg!]

I was having a think about data security, and what it means to me. It's all about risk, and how you deal with it. These are my 'perceived' risks:

1. I lose my data because I'm human. I can guarantee it. I'll delete something I shouldn't. I'll leave laptop on a bench somewhere.

2. My computer will fail. Or I'll drop it.

3. Some chav will break into my house and steal my computers.

A good backup regime will fix all of the above. However, what a backup won't do is keep my data safe from people who would do harm, hence the encryption stuff: Filevault and Crashplan. I think it's fair to say I wouldn't stand a chance against someone bent on getting international trade secrets from my laptop. But I'm not that paranoid or that important! What I try to do is protect myself against (my) real world stuff.

How real is the risk that Basilisk (thanks by the way) describes? As mentioned in the original post, I'm not an IT professional. I think a lot of people who come to this site would find an explanation of the risk this poses in layman's terms extremely useful. Context is pretty important too.

Another thing worth thinking about is how realistic safety measures are to implement for your average mac user. It's a real shame Time Machine doesn't play well with Filevault. It's as if Apple decided it was a bit too hard to integrate, so they quietly forgot about it. If anything, us minority Filevault users need better backup support than unencrypted users.

Stuart.



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What's the risk?
Authored by: chucky23 on May 01, '09 06:52:49AM
"How real is the risk that Basilisk (thanks by the way) describes?"

Quite real.

I don't use CrashPlan (or any other internet backup), but it seems as if a technically advanced user could rather easily access your data if they came into possession of your computer.

If you want to use FileVault, you are best off giving up on easily versioned backups.

You have two good local backup options:

1) Logout of your FileVault account and use Time Machine. This seems possibly unreliable to me. I don't think it's been tested well enough, but it could work just fine.

2) Logout of your FileVault account and use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. The trick here is to manually maintain multiple backups. In other words, do an incremental backup every day or every couple of days, and also do a new backup from scratch every week or every couple of weeks. That way, if your FileVault image gets corrupted, you will have a previous backup to return to.

The whole trick to using FileVault is having multiple separate backups of your FileVault image. If you are unwilling to go through the hassle of doing this (which isn't too much of a hassle once you spend an afternoon getting things set up), you shouldn't be using FileVault in the first place. But if you do keep separate backups, FileVault becomes a viable way to store your user data.

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