My friend has asked me to look around for a utility that can encrypt an entire hard drive. The hard drive will be used only with one machine, but there are 3 users on it, and he only wants himself to be able to access the drive. Is there a program out there that will encrypt an entire hard drive so that it requires a password to either mount it or access files?
remember, this hard drive will not be moved to another machine, so if something actually has to be installed into the system, that would be fine.
Thanks,
Coius
what about the built in (if it's running 10.3 or 10.4) filevault? it's under the security panel in system preferences. It sounds like that would do everything you would need. I used to use it, but since i'm running on a 400mhz G3, it really became a bottleneck, so I disabled it. Still, if you have the power, use it. it's a very nice system.
-digital
on the large hard drive he has, it says that it requires more hard drive space than the hard drive is in order to encrypt it. I don't think there's any data on it...
Sounds to me like a bug... Got any other suggestions?
I don't think it's a bug. it makes a copy of the home folder, so you would need enough space as the home folder is big. Sorry, but i have never used anything but filevault. it's very secure, but it takes space.
-digital
Filevault only encrypts your home folder. I'm not aware of a app that will do the entire drive, but I'm sure that there's one out there.
He could use an encrypted disk image, but I doubt that would satisfy any kind of tinfoil hattery, so I suggest looking into using PGP to encrypt an entire hard disk. It won't work for the boot disk, but it works on any other disk, is 'transparent', and the encrypted disk format is compatable with Windows and Mac OS. It looks like you can download it from here.
Using a static encrypted disk image almost the size of the drive will work. Its free, er... built in to Disk Utility.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107333
er couldnt you just set it up so that the hard drive only had permissions from a specific user? assuming of course that the user in question is the admin, and the other two users arent