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This tip is BAD
Authored by: Lectrick on Jan 12, '04 12:17:46PM

Mac OS X hints REALLY needs a rating system. This is an extremely poor way of just doing the following:

1) Open Disk Utility
2) Select Images > New > Blank Image...
3) pick a name, location, a starting size (it will expand though, being a sparseimage), AES-128 encryption, and format: Sparse Disk Image
4) voila!
::grumble::

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In /dev/null, no one can hear you scream



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This tip is BAD
Authored by: JohnnyMnemonic on Jan 12, '04 12:52:33PM
This is a pretty bad hint--encrypted disk images have been around since 10.2 at least.

What I was expecting was that it would auto-mount the protected folder on login with a password stored in one's keychain.

Although this hint didn't supply that, can you do that with a regular protected disk image?

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This tip is BAD
Authored by: n.amadori on Jan 12, '04 07:43:52PM

Very simple: when you create the disk image make sure to check the box "store password in keychain". The drag'n drop the image (the file .sparseimage, not the virtual drive) in your Startup Items in the Account pane of the System Preferences.

The encripted image will mount automatically at every login.



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Correction on sparseimage remark
Authored by: Lectrick on Jan 13, '04 12:02:42PM

The sparseimage size you pick is the MAXIMUM size it will expand to, not the size it starts out as. Sorry about the error...

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In /dev/null, no one can hear you scream



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Sparseimage may not work in every version of apples diskutility
Authored by: novalies on May 27, '04 09:20:36AM

I have tryed to create a sparse disk image with my version of the disk utility with Versionnumber: 10.4 (145) and OS X 10.3.2 and it is not possible! Small images dosn“t grow and if you create a image with 700 MB it has the size of 700 MB on the Harddrive.
Maybe Apple has disabled this feature in DiskImage again or my version is to old. Now I try the Terminal command.



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sparse images fragment
Authored by: djarsky on Jan 13, '04 10:03:10PM

One reason not to use sparse images is that they heavily fragment on your drive as they need to 'grow'. This isn't the case with Panther's file-vaulted home directories because when a user logs out the OS can automatically defragment and claim unused space in the file-vaulted image. I doubt this would happen if you follow this tip.

For a disk image that's constantly being written to, it's much better to create a large read/write image, than a growable sparse image. Sparse images are great for one time 'write', like backing up a whole bunch of files and burning the image.



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sparse images fragment
Authored by: Bookman on Jun 05, '04 03:55:58AM

Is this true? Why wouldn't Mac OS X clean up the fragmented image once it was dismounted, like it will any other file?

I thought our days of worrying about file fragmentation and disk optimization were past.

--Books



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sparse images fragment
Authored by: beeble on Jun 16, '04 10:36:56PM

defrag only works in Panther on files < 20MB in size. The idea is that a file of 20MB or less is probably going to fit into an available continuous block of space so the whole thing gets rewritten. Computers and drives are fast enough now that most people won't see the overhead from the extra work.

The problem with sparse images is that they are greater than 20MB so they don't get defragmented. As they expand, they create lots of little segments over the hard drive and end up very fragmented. They are designed for the purpose of dumping files in of an unknown total size, copying the image to some other drive or device and then deleting the image.

For almost any other circumstance, a regular image will serve you better.

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um!



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