So I’ve been playing with OSXCrypt and TrueCrypt for a few days now, and found out some things that aren’t so obvious from the websites.
- Both can only format in the FAT filesystem. Since their primary virtue over encrypted DMGs is cross-platform portability, this probably isn’t too big of a deal.
- You can use the disk utility to reformat a mounted encrypted volume if you want another filesystem.
- With TrueCrypt volumes, you can’t eject from finder, with OSXCrypt you can eject from finder but need to complete from command-line anyway.
- OSXCrypt is MUCH faster than the official TrueCrypt release. I didn’t do benchmarking, but the difference is easily noticeable.
- You can’t copy large files into a TrueCrypt volume unless you use Disk Utility to reformat to another filesystem.
- OSXCrypt doesn’t yet do full-disk encryption, and seems to be unable to create an encrypted disk larger than 1GB.
- TrueCrypt has a GUI, but it doesn’t really feel like it was designed for mac. OSXCrypt has no GUI, but it’s pretty self-explanitory usage (I had an easier time figuring out OSXCrypt than TrueCrypt).
- It seems that OSXCrypt won’t mount images that don’t have a .img suffix (due to their usage of hdiutil).
- From what I’ve seen around the internet, OSXCrypt is currently more reliable than TrueCrypt.
While it seems neither is quite ready for day-to-day use, I’ll be sticking with OSXCrypt and/or sparseimage files for now. I’m certainly looking forward to support of full-disk encryption, however.
I have also been searching for a way to encrypt a partition / disk. It amazed me that encrypted image files were native to OS X, but you couldn’t encrypt a disk at all.
One thing I noticed with TrueCrypt on OS X is the fact that it creates a .dmg file of the encrypted volume and then mounts the .dmg. Next time you mount a volume with TrueCrypt, do a “Right Click -> Get Info” on the volume. You will see the path of the temporary .dmg file.
I hope that Mac will support encrypted volumes soon. After all, Windows and Linux already have it.