Filevault Woes

[rhg247]

I know there are mixed opinions out there about Filevault, but I've had it up and running since Panther (now 10.4.1) on my cube and my g4 ibook with no worries. That is until it did its "reclaiming disk space" thing when I tried to restart. Now my beloved cube is just sitting there almost all the way logged out with the reclaiming disk space progress bar just spinning away. It's been hung there for about 8 hours. I've had filevault take a long time before--maybe 30 minutes to restart, but this is a little absurd.

Anyone ever been in the same boat? I'm afraid to forcibly restart for fear of it eating my home dir. Should I keep waiting or am I sol?

 

[mklos]

Can you still access your Cube from your iBook? If so, I'd try and get to your home folder and back it up on your iBook. Then force it to reboot. If it craps out then you have it on backup, if it doesn't then you're ok and you can try reclaiming space again.

BTW...did you delete a large file, or a bunch of files in your home folder? Keep in mind that your desktop is part of your home folder. If it has a large amount of space to reclaim then it will take a while, but 8 hours seems a little much. I think something went wrong somewhere along the lines.

 

[buryyourbrideau]

i highly doubt that filevault is running normal if it is taking 8 hours to recover

i think the longest mine has gone was about 40 minutes

unless you have an absurd amount of data

i think something here is wrong

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I had the disk space reclaiming hang on me a couple of times while I still used FileVault. Everything always came up nicely after a hard restart. Never lost a single bit. But, of course, de-fragmenting the encrypted disk image is just the kind of process that, when crashing, can cause big problems, so I consider myself lucky, and has stopped using FileVault all together, in part because of the risk of losing all my data...

 

[rhg247]

No, I can't access the cube from my ibook -- good idea though. ssh doesn't even work so I think making an emergency backup is not gonna happen. Oh well. And no, I didn't just delete gigs of data and the partition is only 25 gigs. Soooo...All I did was download the new quicktime 7.0.1 update and when the installer asked me to restart...this ***** happened. It's good to know that this has happened before and didn't hose the system. I guess I'll let it go to morning and then reboot. Thanks all!

 

[rhg247]

Success!

For future reference, I got up the nerve and just rebooted. All is well and I'm posting this from my cube. Filevault didn't eat my home dir. Yay!