Hi, After waiting for 6-7 hours on trying to get Knox to created a whole disc encrypted with fixed size and the best encryption, I aborted the project. After this it was not possible to force quit Knox in any manner whatsoever. I opened Disc Utility but (as has happened in situation not dissimilar to this) Disc Utility was not possible to force quit. I managed to turn off my computer normally after disconnecting (by pulling the plug) the external FW drive. When I started up Knox asked me for a password, but the password I had entered in creating the vault was not accepted. I opened Disc Utility (after closing Knox) and erased the drive again. Then I started again to try and see if I perhaps did something to cause Know not to act properly the first time, but realised that it just takes a lot of time (perhaps) to encrypt a whole 250 GB disc - but how long - any idea? The point I see with Knox is that it allows me to create whole encrypted discs (maybe I could do something similar in Disc Utility, not sure). The thought being is to run FileVault on the Mac and then copy selected folders inside this FileVault to the Knox encrypted external disc with some third part backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner on a schedule—it seems like this should be possible to do … . Or any idea of how to do this in an easier way? (It is important that the backups must run while the FileVault is mounted and the user logged in.) Thanks, /Jerry

Long. We’re thinking of ways to de-emphasize the “fixed size” feature in the New Vault dialog since it’s not really the best way to go in most of the cases—especially not for big disks. Here’s what the FAQ says about the subject:

Should I choose a stretchable or a fixed-size whole disk vault?
In almost all cases, you should choose the default stretchable type. It’s fast to create and easy to backup, as the encrypted disk image only takes as much space as the content you are encrypting. There are a couple of specific instances where you might want to use the fixed-size option. It creates an image that fills the whole disk with encrypted data (initially, encrypted zeroes). This takes a while (a long while if you have a large disk) but has some potential benefits as well. First of all, a fixed size vault does not reveal the amount of data you have stored on it to those without a password. Second, write speeds to the vault can be more consistent as the system does not need to stretch the vault as you write more data onto it. Finally, since the underlying non-encrypted volume has almost no free space, you can be more confident that someone will not accidentally store files on it.