Filevault problems

A slightly hair-raising moment a couple of days ago - logging into the Powerbook, everything seemed suspiciously - default. No bouncing icons, no backdrop, no contacts and worse, no mail. Turns out I’m the victim of the vanishing Filevault syndrome - the logging-out process is supposed to go through some sort of a clean-up process before shutting down. and sometimes it’s a little too enthusiastic about cleaning up. With the net result that everything vanishes.

As it turned out (after a call to the Apple support people - oh the shame, seeking help from another real human being instead of Google) the data was still there once I’d gone back in and turned Filevault off again. It popped back up as a .sparseimage file, buried away somewhere non-obvious. Double-clicking the file brings up a prompt for the password, after which it mounts as a disk image. Then copying over the Library folder and playing around with the permissions means that it’s possible to retrieve application settings etc.

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