Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / February 2005

It appears that the 10.3.8 update has broken my user login that has
FileVault turned on. From the other logins everything appears fine but
the FileVault user just gobbles up disk space at an alarming rate with
nothing (by the user) running. I've tried many of the usual suspects.
I've often found that repairing permissions inexlicably has things to
fix right after a system update but that did little and fixed nothing.
I ran it both in the FileVault user and an administrator user. From the
administrator user I only had the option of running repair disk on the
mounted sparseimage. It reported a minor error in the header but didn't
have sufficient privileges to proceed with the repair.

I also ran MacJanitor on the off chance that some log file was being
fed at a high rate but it also didn't make any difference. When I threw
away some files from my home directory (I had no choice since the
system was merrily proceeding to fill the entire remaining gigabytes of
the drive that contains it), it did bring up the dialog asking if I'd
like to recover some of the space when I logged out. It did but during
the time it was running it seemed to gobble some more.

Is this one of those updates that is going to require that I
reinistialize my drive in order to be able to run the new system? Has
it been tested with earlier versions of FileVault? I feel particularly
foolish because I have been using FileVault for an extended time and
felt I could recommend it to others to use. Having this sort of failure
crop up could easily convince many to stay far away from the technology.