[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to encrypt an external hard drive in Lion here

[CharlesSoto8ixi]

Are you able to convert this back into a non-encrypted HFS+ drive without erasing again?

[NaOH]

It would be good to see some information about how this implementation deals with issues such as file system corruption and other disk related difficulties.

[akeller]

Very helpful and clear. Thanks/

[Josesk]

Useful article! Thanks. I still miss some comments/warnings about already encrypted folders (sparsebundles, .dmg, etc) before using FileVault. Are they no longer necessary when using FV? Are there any risks of corruption of these folders? Should they be mounted when FV is encrypting? Any input about any issues with this scenario?

[aestival]

Yay! -- no more worrying about physical hardware theft risks with all hard-drive data laid bare to the thieves (well, aside from government spy agencies and others with extreme hacking abilities).

[iamamacuser]

It would be nice to see an article testing the read/write speeds using this encryption vs. other encryption methods and non-encrypted drives.

[joshua305]

Can you encrypt an external drive without reformatting if it is your boot drive?

[bjgreenberg]

It's worth mentioning that you can encrypt your internal boot drive while it's active with data on it (without the need to format the drive) as well as decrypt it.

This post has been edited by bjgreenberg: 05 August 2011 - 10:57 AM

[BogieWoz]

This is great, but I have a greater need to only encrypt specific files and/or folders, not the whole hard drive. I remember having such an application with OS 7/8/9, but do not find one with OS X. A review of the application I described would be very helpful.

[macsrwe]

BogieWoz, on 05 August 2011 - 12:12 PM, said:

This is great, but I have a greater need to only encrypt specific files and/or folders, not the whole hard drive. I remember having such an application with OS 7/8/9, but do not find one with OS X. A review of the application I described would be very helpful.

Just create an encrypted sparseimage using Disk Utility. Then store your sensitive stuff in it, like a safe. When you dismount it, everything is inaccessible until you mount it again. Time Machine is happy to back it up and everything.

[tacain]

TrueCrypt

[arielauthentic]

You can encrypt an external drive that has data on it with this command:

diskutil cs convert /Volumes/Drivename -passphrase

This will launch a background process. To watch its progress type:

diskutil cs list

In the data that displays is a Gigabytes progress indicator (numerical measurement, no bars or anything)

[arielauthentic]

CharlesSoto8ixi, on 05 August 2011 - 08:10 AM, said:

Are you able to convert this back into a non-encrypted HFS+ drive without erasing again?

Yes. Go to the terminal and type:

diskutil cs revert /Volumes/Drivename -passphrase

bjgreenberg, on 05 August 2011 - 10:56 AM, said:

It's worth mentioning that you can encrypt your internal boot drive while it's active with data on it (without the need to format the drive) as well as decrypt it.

Yup!

http://forums.macwor...post__p__919292