It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
Well, here’s the story: The wife and I have been making attempts at meeting lots of people online and in real-life. We’ve both had some good success with this so far, but more on that later. Since I’ve been meeting all these people through IM’ing and whatnot, I had the healthy fear of a possible security breach within the system. I had financial records in my home folder and other sensitive info like passwords and such that I wouldn’t want anyone having wandering eyes on. So I had the at-the-time brilliant idea of turning on FileVault, A feature buried deep inside the Mac OS X preferences. What this exactly does is take your entire home folder and make what is called a sparse disk image out of it. It not only does that, but it also encrypts the image in 128-AES key encryption with a user-defined password. It encrypts the home folder like this when you log out of Mac OS, and decrypts when you log in to the system with your password.
It worked well… very well…. too well, as a matter of fact! The first few days were no problem. One day, I tried to log in to the system. It gave me a message stating that my user account “could not be accessed at this time. Please try again later.” This was bad news. Needless to say, I tried everything I could. Root login, Apple user forums, web searches… I even dropped $90 in DiskWarrior software in an attempt to crack open the encrypted sparse disk image my files were locked away in. I kid you not, I had over 14 gigs of stuff in my home folder, which I have no access to whatsoever. All the projects I was working on, sites I had backup image files of (including the professional one I was working on!), preferences and setting for so many programs and applications I use every day… gone! The only thing that may have caused this was probably a bad sector on the drive where the sparse disk image was created. It’s like having the key to your house, but all the locks are melted with no back door or windows (har, har!) to use.
So I’ve spent the last few weeks in a state of re-build. The good side to having to start over is I’ve found some neato applications that are making my life a little easier. I explained this to the bird club I webmaster for, and they were very understanding. I repaid them with a healthy update to their site, with brand-spanking new features. (it’s the ASCS link towards the bottom of the sidebar… click it and check it out!)
I also found a way to encrypt sensitive information on a Mac, without having to go to the drastic measures FileVault uses. Note: it’s still a good idea to back up any information that is going to be encrypted onto a CD or external drive!! Mac users, take note…
- Open Disk Utility (in your /Applications/Utilities/ folder)
- At the top of Disk Utilities window, click the New Image icon
- Decide the size you want. For documents, you rarely need anything bigger than 10 MB.
- Select encryption: AES-128
- Keep the format as “read/write disk image”
- Select where you want the disk image to be created
- In Save As: use any name, then hit the “Create” button at the bottom.
When you hit create, it’ll ask you for a password to use. When you enter the password you want to use, the disk image is created in the folder of your choice, opens up, and it’s mounted as a separate “drive”. Now you can move any of your sensitive information in this drive image, delete the old files from where they were (you can also create stuff in this drive) and when you’re finished, eject the drive image. Now, when you want to access what you stored on the disk image, just open it up. A dialogue box will appear asking for the password you used when you created it. The drive image is mounted, and you have access to all the files you stored in it! Neat and tidy!
On to a sub-topic: What I’ve Been Doing Since All This Came Down!
My B-day was July 5th (whoooooooohoooo!). My dear mum saw fit to buy me an upgrade to Bryce 5.5. Since then, I’ve created a few things with it, which I’ll share in a later posting. I’ll probably even put my creations in a separate album in the photo gallery (possible title: Places I visited in my mind??). Also, as I said earlier, I halted work on my stuff to fulfill my obs to the ASCS club. I put some cool stuff on their site! My list of friends online has gotten bigger, my music library expanded a bit, and work has gotten crazier. All this, and more, in my next few posts… coming soon, so stay tuned!
“… coming soon…” Well, sooner than how long it took me this time!! 
Update July 23rd, 3am: I finally got the “Now Playing” plug-in and sidebar option working!! Had problems with it ever since the above-mentioned incident, because my settings were shot to hell. If I’m listening to music when you visit this blog, you’ll see who I’m listening to. Now all I need to do is cough up the broadcasting dough and you’ll see just when Esoterik WebRadio could be on the air!
