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During the encryption, the system was entirely unusable. During the deletion of the old home dir, using the option to cancel after an hour resulted in a long delay. All in all the process took me 4.5 hours. I think we should recommend people move large non-sensitive files out of the home directory (like movies or virtual machine images) before enabling FileVault. They can then be moved back in afterwards with more incremental delay.
Things to note
- Initial encryption took a long time: 4.5 hours
- FileVault protected Home Folder treated as a single file by backup software (SuperDuper!) - caused extra challenges backing up and decreases incremental backup performance
- Dreamweaver Sites stored in the Home Folder are not found after FileVault enabled
- I think this is because Dreamweaver uses an explicit unix path, rather than standard Apple file locations. Still going to show up as a problem for our clients
- Recommend moving large (non-sensitive) files outside of the Home Folder before initial encryption to improve both the initial setup and the future backups.