Mac OS X: FileVault

I†reinstalled†my MacBook Pro recently because it just… well… you know.

Anyhow, I decided that it might be useful to actually start using FileVault to encrypt the content of my homedir. Only, one problem: I have Music, Pictures, Downlaods and Movies on my laptop, which, are stored in my homedir.

As you can guess, encrypting that content is not necessary, for me it really only is the homedir itself and the Documents folder.

So how do we solve this issue? We use symbolic links to actually move the folders out of your homedir but still have them accessible from within.

After the break: How it’s done (if you’re scared of the command-line stop reading here).

• open iTerm or Terminal
• Now let’s move everything out of the homedir: cd ~ sudo mv Downloads/ / ††††††††† What we just did is move the Downloads folder to /, the root of your harddrive, the same location where you can find the Applications folder, the Developer folder etc. You can repeat this for every folder you wish to move out of your homedir. Caution: do not move the Library folder. There already exists a library folder in / which is different from the one in your homedir. Seconds, you do want your personal library encrypted since applications tend to store extra (sometimes sensitive) data in your Application Support (and other) folder(s).
• Now let’s create the necessary symbolic links in your homedir: cd ~ ln -s /Downloads Downloads What this does is create a symbolic link in your homefolder. You’ll see a folder Downloads with the shortcut arrow in the homefolder now, which actually takes you to /Downlaods Do this for every folder you moved out of your homedir, edit the folder icons and have fun!
  Be careful not to run the symlink command as a sudo’er or it will be created with root:admin as owning user and group and everything you then add to it will too, which will cause Mac OS X to ask you to authenticate for about anything.

That’s it!

Note: this setup won’t work on a system with multiple users since everyone is then moving their stuff to the same location on / which is going to cause trouble. You can work around that by doing the following: cd / mkdir username Then alter the commands above similar to this: sudo mv Downloads/ /username/ ln -s /username/Downloads Downloads

One more thing: don’t forget to turn on FileVault in System Preferences > Security > FileVault