Unable to compact an external hard-drive vault

stephen-m

I’ve got a Knox-encrypted external hard drive that I’m unable to compact. (The drive doesn’t [i]contain[/i] a Knox vault. Rather, the entire drive [i]is[/i] a vault—after I turn on the drive, I have to enter a password before I can access any of the files it contains.)



When I click the “Compact Vault” button in the Vaults preference pane, Knox attempts to close the hard-drive/vault, then returns the following message:



[center]Knox was unable to close the vault to be compacted.

An error -1 occurred when Knox tried to close the vault “[i]vaultname[/i]”.[/center]

[center]The vault cannot be compacted.[/center]



[left]Then, right away, a notification flashes on the screen telling me that the vault [i]did[/i] close successfully after all, and that I can safely turn off the hard drive. But by then there’s no way for me to proceed except to start over (and receive the same error message again.)[/left]



[left]OSX is up-to-date. Knox version is the latest stable one: 2.1.13 (172).[/left]



[left]Thanks in advance.[/left]



[left]Stephen[/left]

MikeT

Hi Stephen,



There is no need to compact the vault that's been created to take up the entire drive's capacity, it's intentionally supposed to be the full size. As long as you keep emptying the Trash with the vault opened, the vault will stay the same size and you'll be able to keep deleting files to make up space in it.



With that in mind, you can't compact a drive like you can compact a vault. There are systems in place to prevent this from working correctly. We'll see if we can make this clear in a future update to Knox.



In the meantime, don't compact any externally formatted drives, just empty the trash while the drives are connected. I apologize for the confusion.



Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you.



Thanks!

stephen-m

Hi Mike,



Thanks for your prompt reply. Emptying the trash with the external drive vault open was the first thing I tried. Didn’t change the available drive space; that’s why I thought to compact the vault.



Also, why does Knox make an external drive vault available for compaction and even try to compact the drive if it oughtn’t be done?



Stephen

MikeT

Hi Stephen,



That's what I meant by making this clear in a future update to Knox, Knox can't tell the difference between the encrypted drives and vaults at the moment, it is not filtered out for the compact option. We'll fix this in a future update.



As for the emptying the trash, it will not shrink the drive. The drive capacity will remain the same or continue to grow even as you delete files and empty the trash. The encryption also works on free space, which turns into randomized data instead of being removed, so that's why the capacity stay the same. The vault will continue to grow up until the drive is full and you'll continue to use the vault without any issues while it is full. There are two different capacities here, the external which is your drive's capacity and the internal Knox one, which can't be revealed unless you open the vault and look inside it.



I hope that's a bit clear.

stephen-m

I’m still confused. It’s not you, Mike, I’m often confused. My external drive was almost full, so I deleted about 8gb of old files I no longer needed. I expected that emptying the trash would free up 8gb of space, but that’s not what happened. The drive continued to read as almost full. And when I tried to copy a 4gb file to that drive, an error message informed me that I didn’t have enough free space to complete the operation.



So my question is: is there no way to free up that 8gb of what ought to be available disk space? And along the same lines, if I deleted all the files and emptied the trash, would the drive still read as almost full?



All along, the amount of free space grew as I added files to that drive, even though, as you say, the free space was always encrypted. So now, can I somehow retrieve free space as I delete files?



In the future, would you recommend that, instead of encrypting the entire drive, I simply add one or more vaults to it that could expand and shrink as needed?



Stephen

MikeT

Hi Stephen,



There's a way to compact the vault, it's a bit complicated to do for an external drive.



Emptying the trash while the vault is opened will remove the 8GB of space from within the vault but it will not increase the actual free space of the external drive itself. Are you copying the 4GB file into the vault?



Let's say for an example, the vault file itself is 75GB in size and your external drive is 80GB. if you remove the 10GB of files from within the vault, the vault itself still remains at 75GB but the free space inside the vault is now at 60GB. Finder will still report that the external drive is full with 75GB taken out of 80GB.



Connect your external drive, Knox should then open the vault for you in Finder, now right click on the vault on the Finder's sidebar and select "Get Info". Please take a screenshot of this for us. You can use "Command + Shift + 3" to take a screenshot and then attach this screenshot here for us to look at.



Thanks!

stephen-m

Hi Mike,



Yes, I deleted 8gb from that external HD vault. Then I emptied the trash and tried to write a 4gb file to that same vault. The write attempt failed with a “not enough free space” error message.



Per your request, the info sheet for that external drive is attached.



Stephen