Making bootable clones & encrypting only important files

Santa1900

<div class="IPBDescription">How secure are sparse images</div>Hi,



I know what you recommend when it comes to bootable system clones which is to encrypt the sensitive files and leave the system unencrypted, and after having experimented with PGP Whole Disk encryption, I agree with you. For most homes users that should be good enough, and WDE can create some serious issues. But I was wondering how secure are sparse images relative to whole disk encryption like that provided by PGP. The reason I'm asking is, when I create a full external drive, 2TB, as a Knox vault, it only takes a few minutes to make a password protected vault out of it. But when I encrypt a 250GB external drive with PGP WDE, it takes over six hours. I'm not an expert in encryption, but why are sparse images created so quickly?



Wassili

khad

Hey Wassili,



Are you comparing PGP's Whole Disk Encryption on your active system drive to a creating a Knox vault on a newly formatted external drive? That will make all the difference in the world since encrypting an active drive is much more intensive. I can't speak to the exact process that PGP uses, but Knox uses the Encrypted Disk Image technology built into OS X.



I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have further questions.

Santa1900

Hi Khad,



Obviously, it's not fair to ask questions about PGP at this forum, but I was comparing the two on two external, erased and reformatted drives. I know that Knox is using the Encrypted Disk Image technology built into OS X, which is probably based on some encryption tables. Even on the PGP forum it was regarded as pretty secure for home users. I still wonder why an external drive can be morphed into an encrypted disk image so quickly when it takes PGP WDE hours to encrypt an empty drive that was erased and reformatted, at least that's how long it took to encrypt mine. The two are different technologies, I know. And as I said, there can appear some serious issues with WDE. Just wondered how secure something is when it takes only a few minutes to encrypt.



Regards,

Wassili

MikeT

Hi Wasilli,



PGP encrypts the entire drive, including the empty space. When we first create the entire drive as a Knox Vault, we only created the initial 200mb encrypted file that expands as you add files to the external drive. That’s why PGP takes forever, we didn’t encrypt the whole drive at once.



We start out from this tiny file that expands to fill the whole drive while PGP starts out from the entire drive with no expansion needed.

Santa1900

[quote name='MikeT' timestamp='1298933669' post='21646']

Hi Wasilli,



PGP encrypts the entire drive, including the empty space. When we first create the entire drive as a Knox Vault, we only created the initial 200mb encrypted file that expands as you add files to the external drive. That’s why PGP takes forever, we didn’t encrypt the whole drive at once.



We start out from this tiny file that expands to fill the whole drive while PGP starts out from the entire drive with no expansion needed.

[/quote]



Hi Mike,



Thanks. That clarifies it.



Wassili

MikeT

[quote name='Santa1900' timestamp='1299013805' post='21698']

Hi Mike,



Thanks. That clarifies it.



Wassili

[/quote]You’re welcome. If you have any other questions like this, please do continue to ask and we’ll do our best to make it clear for you.