[Macworld]

Post your comments for Sophos SafeGuard for Mac 5.5 is a powerful encryption tool here

[marcschwartz]

There is another issue here, which has been a significant one for other companies providing similar third party whole/full disk encryption products. These include PGP (now Symantec) and WinMagic. The problem is lengthy delays in making a version of their product compatible when a new major or even incremental release of OSX is made available by Apple. The delays can be months, meaning that you will have to wait until they do in order to apply incremental upgrades or new versions of OSX (eg. Snow Leopard to Lion). In some cases, systems have been bricked during the updates because of incompatibilities.

This is another reason to consider staying with Apple's built-in FileVault2, even if at the expense of some of the other functionality referenced. I gave up on both of the companies I reference.

This post has been edited by marcschwartz: 03 November 2011 - 09:08 AM

[pitagora]

there's a free open source option: Truecrypt

[marcschwartz]

pitagora, on 03 November 2011 - 09:53 AM, said:

there's a free open source option: Truecrypt

Two issues with TrueCrypt, largely relevant if you use TimeMachine for backups:

1. It creates encrypted containers, not true full/whole disk encryption. From my recollection, this means that like the original FileVault, it is not compatible with TimeMachine. The new Lion encryption, because like PGP and WinMagic, is truly whole disk encryption, the encrypted HD file system is transparent to TimeMachine for backups.

2. If you want to encrypt a TimeMachine external backup HD, TrueCrypt is not supported there either, so you cannot create encrypted backup HD's. Again, this is supported by the built-in Lion encryption.

Something to consider.

[SamuelFranzmann]

Just a little tip for people out there using Sophos SafeGuard for Mac. When you create the Admin account for Sophos it will record all letters in the username as being LOWER CASE even if you type it in as upper case. This means that after Sophos is done encrypting after 11 hours and prompts you for that administrative username and password, the username has to be entered in all lower case, regardless of how you created it.
I hope this saves someone pooping in their pants and from having to start from scratch.