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Smallest Knox Vault
Comments
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Hi knouse
I just created a test vault at 1 MB so its defiantly not 10.5 MB.
Open Knox, > Vaults > (click new vault) > set size in advanced optionsFlag 0 -
Hi knouse
See if this helps you out any [url]http://help.agile.ws/Knox/index.html[/url]Flag 0 -
Yep its a little on the slim side dont you think, :) It will be worked on.
I too found knox's manual to be lacking since way before agile purchased it. I do expect great things to come from it. Please stay tuned to the same bat channel same bat time for updates. (the original batman series) :)Flag 0 -
I honestly don't understand how the size thing works. Say I create a new vault that can grow up to 100Mb, why does the unmounted vault already take up 10Mb? And the bigger the maximum size, the bigger the vault. A vault that may go up to 10Gigs is already 53Mb in size without anything in it.
But that's not even the most annoying thing, what bothers me most is that if I want to start small (and lean, for online backup) and want to add size to it later on, as for instance a vault for a particular project grows in assets, I can't seem to do that. There's no option (that I can find anyway) to assign more size to the vault, and when adding a 50Mb file to a 5Mb vault, I get the message "The item can't be copied because there isn't enough space."
Dave, you mention "Knox uses sparse bundles so vaults can start small and grow as needed."
What am I doing wrong here?
It would be really great if the support site would be given an upgrade, it truly gives the minimum amount of info to get started. For instance, when creating a new vault, I get given the option to use 128-bit or 256-bit encryption. Now, I get that 256-bit gives stronger security, so why on earth would I opt for the 128-bit?
Knox really does appear to be a great app, but such things just don't make sense to a regular user like me, I'd love to get these things explained a bit.
Thanks,
JolleFlag 0 -
Jolle, you can try to read the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image"]wiki[/URL] on Sparse Image.
Let me try to help you out with your questions or confusion.
Sparse bundles need to know the limit of how "fat" it can grow (for technical reasons like certain file system can't handle files bigger than certain size), so when you create a sparse bundle of "10MB", you're telling the system to create a file that can only grow up to 10MB, so it won't allow it to grow out of that limit. So if you want to start small, you don't start by setting the limit to small size, you have to decide how fat it can grow before it stop accepting files, otherwise you'll run out of space not only in your sparse bundle but your drives as well. Understand that when deleting files in sparse bundle, it doesn't get smaller, you have to compact the sparse bundles manually, Knox will do it for you if you want. So really, you never need to worry about starting small with Sparse bundles, it'll always start small but each one has a limit of how big it can get and you're the one who set it.
When you create a sparse bundle, it actually slice the whole bundle into 8mb "slices". So the bigger the vault, the more information is needed to manage those slices and so on. The reason for 8mb slices, it allows the ability to sync and backup the differences each time you back up or sync the vault. For example, instead of backing up 100GB vault each time, you are actually backing up only the difference after the initial backup. So 100GB vault for the first time, if second time only one 2mb file was changed, you only backup the 8mb slice that the 2mb file was in, not the whole 100GB vault.
As for encryption, the stronger the encryption, the slower it'll be for any performance as well as much more difficult to crack due to the length of time required. Right now, 128-bit AES encryption is perfectly acceptable for average users, the amount of time require a single 128bit encryption could take hundred of years if not thousands or millions with an average computer now. Even a supercomputer won't bring it within a century. 258-bit just means instead of taking 100,000 years to crack a password, it can take 100 million years instead. Now there's an exception to this, humans are always the weakest link to any security system. If you have a password of "123456", it doesn't matter if it is 128 or 256 bit or even 1024 bit, it'll be cracked within seconds. Password is far more important than the bit size in this case. Make sure you always use a random generated password of much larger than 12 characters that involves special characters, numbers and so on.
Let me know if you have any more questions.Flag 0 -
In addition, when OS X is initializing the file system within the sparse bundle vault it has to pre-allocate some space for itself to manage the drive's eventual use by your files. If you create a 10MB maximum size vault then the overhead is fairly small. As you go up in that maximum size an even greater amount of overhead space must be re-allocated inside... and that makes the beginning size of the vault externally to be also larger. There are no tricks here: it's just like when you buy a 500GB hard drive and as soon as Mac OS X initializes it you're got 494.2GB usable space (I made those numbers up for illustrative purposes only). The same happens inside each vault you create. If you have exactly 10MB of files you want stored in a vault, your initial maximum size needs to be bigger than 10MB to allow for that overhead. But until you actually store the files inside the vault won't be the full size.Flag 0
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Mikhail, thanks so much for you extensive response, it really helped clear things up.
Marty, the analogy of hard drives makes sense as well, thanks!
Why can't this info just be on the Knox help site though? If someone at Agile would just take another day for that, it could add so much use to that site...
One thing I wasn't getting was: how do I increase the size of the sparse bundle if at some point it turns out I need that. I guess that's not possible, and assume the best solution would be to create a new, bigger vault and copy my files in that vault, right?Flag 0 -
[quote name='Jolle']Mikhail, thanks so much for you extensive response, it really helped clear things up.
Marty, the analogy of hard drives makes sense as well, thanks!
Why can't this info just be on the Knox help site though? If someone at Agile would just take another day for that, it could add so much use to that site...
One thing I wasn't getting was: how do I increase the size of the sparse bundle if at some point it turns out I need that. I guess that's not possible, and assume the best solution would be to create a new, bigger vault and copy my files in that vault, right?[/QUOTE]
It's possible via command line for sure, "hdiutil resize -size 20g img". Change img to your image file name. I guess we can ask AgileWS to add resize capability to Knox.Flag 0 -
Brilliant, Mikhail, thanks!
This would indeed make a great feature, would be incredibly useful if Agile could implement it (under 'Disk usage' in the Vaults preference pane would seem perfect to me). I've contact Agile and referred to this thread, asking to consider this feature request.
Cheers!
JolleFlag 0 -
[quote name='Jolle']Brilliant, Mikhail, thanks!
This would indeed make a great feature, would be incredibly useful if Agile could implement it (under 'Disk usage' in the Vaults preference pane would seem perfect to me). I've contact Agile and referred to this thread, asking to consider this feature request.
Cheers!
Jolle[/QUOTE]
Unless your need involves something "sensitive" that you can't mention in an open forum you can always ask for features here in the forums as well.Flag 0
