I recently upgraded my MacBook from OS X 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard and have been mostly pleased with the upgrade. The upgrade itself was simple enough, and most of the changes are subtle enhancements. A few of my favorites are the todo list in Mail, and Mail’s new ability to recognize dates in messages and create iCal appointments from them. One of the neater graphical upgrades is PhotoBooth and iChat’s new option to show you against any background.
Of course, I did have bigger reasons for upgrading: Time Machine and FileVault. Though I’m pretty handy with rsync, it’s not as clean - or reliable - as a built-in solution. Time Machine also offers a very simple interface, but the two-click setup soon brought up a FileVault issue. It Machine can’t backup older FileVault drives, so I needed to “turn FileVault off and then back on”. Or, as one would say outside of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, decrypt and re-encrypt over 30GB of data. Naturally, this takes a good bit of extra space, and more than I had, so it took some shuffling of files to an external drive for it to work.
One last oddity after that was a pause while “backing up home directory” when I logged out or restarted, which makes sense if they’re doing something based on the encrypted image once it’s unmounted. Going back in Time Machine, it turns out the only thing it exposes is the single, encrypted image file of the home directory - no individual files! Needless to say, that’s not very useful, and plenty of other people are making the same complaint. What good are slick methods of protecting and backing up your data when they won’t work together?!
