Mac Geekery

Early versions of Panther did very nasty things to FileVault homes so I’ve not been brave enough to try them since.

In short:

1. It offers good encryption.
2. It slows things down on slower machines.
3. It does not lend easily to incremental backups (unless using rsync).
4. It can potentially lose your entire home in one swoop if the catalog entry for the image is damaged on the system disk.

I strongly prefer the creation of a single encrypted image I keep in my Documents folder that holds sensitive items and keeping a good backup of that data in a physically secure location at home just incase the image bites it.