Topic: Knox / copy error?

If the vault has not been stretched through use up to that 250 MB, should that be the limit given at creation time, it can’t occupy any new space on the drive due to it being full, which is what I’d assume happens here. Can you verify that this is the case? Thanks.

Topic: Knox / Menubar Icon

Hi and sorry for the delay. I’m not sure about the grayish thing, which I can also see when switching background images. We do draw over the images when backups take place.

Topic: Knox / copy error?

Is there space left on the destination drive SuperDuper is copying the vault to?

Topic: Knox / iDisk? Other remote disks?

A vault like any other drive can’t be directly opened and accessed on two computers at the same time, but you can open the vault on one computer, share the vault’s mount point with file sharing and then access it from the other computer, should this suit your purpose. In this case you’ll have to make sure the file sharing protocol supports encryption or is run through a secure tunnel, if the sharing is done over an untrusted network.

Topic: Knox / Knox and software Raid 1?

Hi! Creating a whole-disk vault on top of a RAID volume would require some changes to be made to the vault creation process. Regular vaults do work fine on top of one. I’ll put this in as a feature request.

Topic: Knox / Network backup location not found

Hi Daniel,

1. Knox complains about the backup volume not being present. This should not happen if I tell Knox not to prompt me.

4. Even after I told Knox to manually backup all vaults, it still occasionally prompts for the backup drive when Time Machine uses the Time Capsule.

Is this setting the same for the group “All Vaults” as well? For whichever set, an individual vault, “All Vaults” or “Selected Vaults”, this is selected last should override any overlapping ones.

2. Knox does not try to mount the volume if it is not present. Can it?

Knox itself won’t, but OS X might detect us trying to access a recently mounted network volume and prompt for the credentials to access it. After a successful mount Knox will start backing up to this volume.

3. Backing up large vaults that I have not even opened once since the last backup takes very long.

The incremental backup relies on hard links, which unfortunately is not supported on volumes shared with AFP.

Topic: Knox / "Inactivity Timer" Option

Unfortunately this would require forcing the closing of the vault, as there are likely to be open documents if the vault is left open in the first place. Forcefully unmounting a volume would probably lead to data loss.

Topic: Knox / Automatic Hiding

Obscuring the location of the vault files probably would not prevent a knowledgeable person from finding them, as any encrypted disk images created with tools provided by Apple have a telltale header identifying them as such, and scanning for that in a bunch of files is quite a speedy process. Using a strong password and closing the vaults whenever they are not in active use is the most effective way of preventing any attackers from accessing your files.

Topic: Knox / Knox 1.6: Vault couldn't be backed up

If you don’t have a need for speedy Spotlight searches to documents inside the vaults, a workaround is creating an empty file called “no_log” (no extension) into the root of the vault inside a directory called ”.fseventsd”. This will disable fsevents (and Spotlight along with it) from keeping a hold on the mounted vault volume when we try to re-mount the volume as read-only. At the moment we’re waiting for Apple to respond to this specific case (rdar://6352164/)

Topic: Knox / Knox 1.6.2 won't open

Is Knox also not present in the menu bar? Beginning with 1.6, Knox places itself into the menu bar mode (small briefcase icon beside the clock) by default if the user has not used previous version in the Dock mode. Deleting the .plist file and starting up will prompt Knox to place itself into the menu bar and present a notification window right below the briefcase icon for a few seconds.

Knox will actually bounce a few times in the Dock every time you launch it, only to restart and place itself in the menu bar.

Topic: Knox / Knox 1.6.2 won't open

Hi, does /Applications/Utilities/Console.app list anything interesting when you try to launch it? Does extracting the zip file to someplace else have an effect?

Topic: Knox / Knox 1.6.2 is now available

The free update to registered users can be downloaded from https://www.knoxformac.com/download/latest/

New since Knox 1.6.1:

- Fixes a migration bug in Sparkle which caused automatic updates to be disabled after upgrading from version 1.5.3.

- Knox won’t attempt to close vaults when upgrading to a newer version

New since Knox 1.6:

- Fixes the updating of power supply status, which affected being able to compact vaults.

- Minor fixes and logging clarifications.

Knox 1.6:

The highlights are listed below. Thank you for your patience in waiting for this release!

New since Knox 1.5.3:

- Knox now creates Leopard-only “sparse bundle” vaults by default. This vault type is more reliable than the old “sparse images”, and much faster to compact. To create a vault compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, choose the appropriate compatibility setting in “Advanced options”.

- A new backup mechanism is used when backing up Leopard-only vaults onto a drive formatted as “Mac OS Extended”. Only the portions of the vaults that have changed since the last backup are copied to the backup destination. Since these backups share the non-changed portions of their data, they are set as read-only on the backup volume. This is similar to the way Time Machine works.

- Open vaults can now be backed up on Leopard

- Whole-disk vaults larger than 512 GB can now be formatted on drives with only one partition.

- Knox no longer opens unencrypted disk images. They are handed over to DiskImageMounter.app instead.

- Knox now starts in the menu bar by default. Existing Knox users are not affected.

- Vaults cannot be compacted while a portable computer is on battery power.

- Vaults won’t be created to the default vault location if it has been moved to the Trash.

- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused vaults to be renamed to have the same name as the main system volume.

- Fixes a possible crash when canceling a vault creation process at a certain stage.

- Fixes a Knox responsiveness issue when a network volume containing Knox vaults became unreachable.

- Other minor bug fixes and enhancements.

Topic: Knox / Backing up vaults...

Hi. If the vault was created with Knox 1.6b or a later version using the default options (“Compatibility” being set to 10.5), the subsequent backups will only need to back up the portions of the vaults that include changed files. The vault being open or closed won’t matter, as Knox only does a backup when the data itself is in an immutable state, which is essentially either a closed vault or an open vault that Knox sets as read-only for the duration of the backup. I hope this clarified the process a bit. Thanks!

Topic: Knox / vault name change

That should be fine. When changing a vault name in the Finder, Knox will also try to update the volume name, either immediately if the vault is mounted or when it is mounted the next time.

The “Move Selected to Trash” will trash the vault file, should Knox have clue where the vault file is currently. Does the vault also not show up in the list if you click and hold Knox’s icon for some time?

Was the vault mounted at the time? Could you by chance have also removed the “sparseimage” or “sparsebundle” extension from the name? If you select the greyed out vault in the Vaults tab, does it display a message in the box below?

If the vault was open at the time and it does not show in the Finder’s side bar, you can locate the vault data by pressing shift+cmd+g in the Finder, and typing in /Volumes. Most drive volumes, including your vaults are mounted here. You can close the vault by going into the vault folder and choosing “Eject …” in Finder’s “File” menu.

Vaults are created by default in Documents/Knox in your home folder, where you should be able to locate the vault in any case.

Topic: Knox / Language available?

Hi and yes, the French localization is on an indefinite hiatus.

Topic: Knox / Knox 1.6: Vault couldn't be backed up

Hi Scott. I’d be interested in which version of OS X are you currently running. Has this issue come up before with open vaults?

Topic: Knox / Vaults don't stay open after restart

Unfortunately we haven’t been able to reproduce this and the beta should not bring any fixes in this regard. I’d be interested what the test with another user brings up!

Topic: Knox / Will vaults be backed up by SuperDuper?

Spotlight might be indexing the volume during and end up with a broken index, which isn’t quite critical, but you’ll have to make sure that any application that stores data on the volume does not rely on tasks that fire up when the user is idle, and end up with partial data on the side of the backup.

Topic: Knox / Will vaults be backed up by SuperDuper?

Yes, provided that the vaults are closed during SuperDuper’s backup, so that the vault data will stay the same during the time it takes to copy it over to the destination.

Should you choose to back up vaults with Knox itself, the beta version of Knox 1.6 can now make open vaults read-only for the time of their backup, which will guarantee the same thing.

Topic: Knox / spotlight search question

The index is only stored inside the vault, so Spotlight will not be able to access this information when the vault is not mounted.

Topic: Knox / does password get stored?

A password for a vault is only stored in the Keychain should you choose to do so.

However when opening a vault, the password is used to unlock the encryption key and it will be present in the memory for as long as you keep the vault open. If someone gets physical access to your computer during this time, they might be able to extract the key from the computer’s memory. One should always close the vault when it is not in use, especially when not being present at the computer for some time. See this site for more information on this.

Does Knox have features that are different than the disk utility bundled with OSX

Knox is a front-end to the same functions that Disk Utility also provides, but we think it’s a lot more convenient in the same tasks and more.

Topic: Knox / Open USB vault on another computer?

If it’s a single vault file stored on a USB drive among other files you can right-click (or ctrl-click) the vault file and choose to open it with DiskImageMounter.app, which should be present in the menu.

If you dedicate the whole USB drive as a whole-disk vault in the vault creation, a copy of Knox will be stored on the drive just for these kinds of situations. Double-clicking the vault file will open the Knox.app stored alongside with it.

Topic: Knox / The best of Knox and SuperDuper! How?

Hi Gian,

SuperDuper! by default does not seem to contain such a “Copy Script” that would exclude users and their files from the system backup. These scripts can be modified to exclude certain files and directories through the user interface.

“Sandbox – shared users and applications” does come close as only symbolic links, or aliases as Finder puts it, to user home directories and third party applications are created onto the backup. If the files where the links point to however are not present, booting from this backup could be a bit wonky. One could create a vault onto which back up their home directory, mount the vault on the “Sandboxed” system while on a different user account and make a symbolic link point to this home directory on the vault, for example /Volumes/”vaultname”/”user’s home directory” pointing to /Volumes/”original sandbox volume name”/Users/”user’s home directory”. This should work but I haven’t tested this myself.

Pretty much anything outside the user’s home directory is considered as System.

I myself have a bootable plain install of Leopard on an external drive, on which I run software updates somewhat regularly. It does not have any users apart from the administrator created at installation time. As an addition to this you could create two partitions, both having a clean installation of Leopard. After booting from one copy and using it for a while, you could zero out the partition using Disk Utility and reimage it with SuperDuper! from the pristine installation.

Topic: Knox / USB Drive says it is closing and vanishes

Hello Darach! It’s hard to tell what might be wrong with the drive, if anything. Have you tried erasing the drive on another computer? A windows computer would probably be up for the job as well.

Topic: Knox / encrypting only when close the vault?

Your mileage may vary on the speed of the processor (and if it’s under load) and the speed of the USB drive. Copying a file into a vault stored on a relatively recent Kingston Datatraveler USB stick, on an Intel Mac will give me about 2.5MB/s transfer rate. I agree in the sense that the trade-off between performance and security should not be too big where users would start discarding these security measures.