As neat and secure as Apple’s FileVault feature (which encrypt’s one’s home directory) is, I’ve abandoned it. Last night I had brought my laptop to a grinding halt (doing too much, memory-hungry apps, etc) and rather than wait it out, I just rebooted it. It screwed up the filesystem on which my home drive resided, which with FileVault is in an encrypted sparse image file. I was unable to fsck it and repair it — apparently I would have needed a $90 program called DiskWarrior.

FileVault, I discovered last week, was also behind my inability to “grab” a bunch of items from Finder with Quicksilver — something I use probably 100 times per day or more at work.

Luckily, not much of my personal data ever resides in my home directory, and what’s there is always available elsewhere, so I just wiped that user account and started over. It’s too bad, because it was going pretty well. Apple’s early iterations of FileVault were kind of buggy, but this time around it was much more solid.

Just not quite solid enough.