A little over a month ago I was having some font issues with LaTeX, and I wasn’t sure why. In fact, I never really figured out why. But basically I was getting some ugly bitmap fonts, and I wasn’t going to accept that. So I tried a bunch of things, including trying to re-install tetex. Eventually, I decided to totally re-install fink. In the process, I thought I could maybe just copy the whole /sw directory from my external hard-drive backup. I made one big mistake here though. Instead of copying backup/sw/* to /sw, I copied backup/sw/* to /, meaning that I unintentionally overwrote some important files. So I ended up reinstalling the whole OS. This took some time, but since pretty much everything was backed up, I was not too worried, and it seems like a fresh install is good every now and then anyways.
After, I reinstalled, I decided to try FileVault, which is a neat idea in theory. It encrypts your entire home directory as a sparse disk image, and when you log in, decrypts it on the fly. While you are logged in, it looks like a normal home directory. When you are logged out, it is one large password-protected and encrypted file. So, if you lose your laptop, your data is safe. Even if someone takes the hard-drive out of your computer. Your data is 128-bit AES encrypted, and unless they guess your password, it is very hard to crack.
Graphic Converter is an excellent Mac program that convert just about any image type into just about any other. It is shareware, but pretty good shareware. Without paying you get almost full functionality except customizing batch processing. I finally ponied up the $30 about a year ago, and it has definitely been worth it. So, batch processing. For batch processing Graphic Converter does not use the native file chooser, but uses its own. It would not recognize my home directory using FileVault. How crappy.
There you have it. If you do have a bunch of sensitive data (on a laptop especially), I would nevertheless recommend using FileVault, in spite of the problems. If you recall, the last few major cases of personal data theft has been by stealing hard drives and laptops, not by hacking into computer systems. We need both physical and virtual security. Encrypting your data helps on both fronts.
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