Is a SD clone of a Lion FileVault protected computer also encrypted?

[mmueck]

Couple things about your forum site:
- I can't enter text into the quick reply section
- By the time I ponder and enter all the text for my reply I'm logged out. Could the time before auto-logout be increased a bit?

Anyway, here's my pasted reply before I got logged out:


Just working away on the computer as the very wet and windy remnants of Hurricane Irene pass over :-). I guess I can always revert to FV-1, but I have a suspicion it is ONLY possible when upgrading to Lion which means I have to go back to my SL backup.

Now here's a thought for you (if you don't mind a challenge). I just booted into the recovery partition and you can do some limited stuff there, including even bring up Safari. The partition is 650MB in size and SD is only 5.6MB in size. Would it be possible to copy and run SD from there? Because that partition is not encrypted you should be able to clone your main partition as-is and also, presumably, the recovery partition and end up with a real clone. There are several issues though - there is no Finder in the recovery partition so you can't double click on an application. You can bring up a Terminal window but I couldn't figure out how to open an application from there. I reckon I'm at the limits of my unix prowess at this point...

[dnanian]

I think you may be having browser issues. I never get logged out.

I had no plans to put us on the recovery partition. Instead, install Lion in full to a thumb drive, and run it from there. No limitations, far more useful, etc.

[mmueck]

Now that's a good idea! I'll assume that's going to work and shall go ahead and encrypt my Mac now.

And it looks like you're also enjoying Irene - you're in Weston, I'm in Andover :-).

[mmueck]

If I do clone my Mac's encrypted hard drive to another drive using your suggestion about running SD from a Lion pen drive, then presumably if I want to later extract a couple files from the back up drive then how would that work? In the old FV I would double click on the sparse bundle and enter the appropriate password to access it. Now the whole back up drive will be encrypted. Do you know for sure if I'll be able to access it freely - I guess I'm assuming the Finder in Lion will prompt me for a password or decryption key, right?

[dnanian]

You should be able to access the encrypted drive like any other drive, since once mounted it'll look unencrypted.