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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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