FileVault and Parallels

G

geofcorb

Junior Member
Has anyone had any experiences-- good or bad-- that they would like to share about using FileVault with Parallels? If you have enabled FileVault for your home directory, do you keep your Parallels virtual hard drives in your encrypted home directory? If so... do you experience any performance degradation? If not... where do you put it and why?

I am curious about how to optimally configure a Mac to use these two products/features.

Thanks,
- GC
 
Firevault works with a VM, as it encrypts/decrypts things on the fly. Personally, I would recommend keeping the .hdd seperate and using shared folders as the preformance hit would not be there.
 
I have FileVault active all the time on my MacBook Pro; it's a concession I had to make to use this in our normally all Windows environment at work.

You don't want to put the VM's inside of your encrypted user folder at any time; the performance will be attrocious. The encryption/decryption that has to go on for everything you open and close is way too much for the computer and HD to handle

I made a folder on the root level of the HD and put my VM's in it. Performance is great and it's never impacted by the encryption.
 
geofcorb said:
Has anyone had any experiences-- good or bad-- that they would like to share about using FileVault with Parallels? If you have enabled FileVault for your home directory, do you keep your Parallels virtual hard drives in your encrypted home directory? If so... do you experience any performance degradation? If not... where do you put it and why?
Click to expand...
I have been using Parallels with FileVault since the first release, and have had no issues relative to performance. (Bear in mind that my VMs -- including the HDD files -- are stored inside my encrypted home directory.)

The only caveat -- and this is unrelated to Parallels -- is that I make daily backups of all data in my home directory. (Sometimes I may backup several times if what I am working on is important enough to warrant it.) Reason being, if you experience a crash or lockup, all encrypted data will be lost.
 
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