Mac PGP WDE Emergency Recovery Procedures
This is more of a serverfault / IT question, but I am not part of the beta.
Hardware / Topology:
- MacBook Pro (OSX operating system) 4 GB RAM
- Used for email, web browsing, basically anything that is not Visual Studio or MS application.
- VMWare Fusion VM (mostly XP) for various development needs
- Main project VS2008
- Custom third party software
- Test setup environment
- etc.
I need full disk encryption [WDE] due to the nature of the data I work with. Since I use both virtual machines and OSX, I cannot simply install TrueCrypt WDE inside my virtual machines as that would leave my OSX data unprotected.
FileVault won't work for several reasons, and I'll leave you to find it, if you really like it, suffice it to say that it won't work for my purpose.
TrueCrypt WDE is fantastic and would be my distributed solution if it works with EFI intel layouts. (PGP has a solution that works for Macs.
The problem is simple: what happens if you need to access a disk without booting the system?
With TrueCrypt, you can install a disc from BartPE or another Windows system with TC installed and copy the data.
Is there a way to do this with PGP for Mac that people know about? Ask others to fix this problem already?
I know that you can decrypt a drive in an emergency, but there are times when this is undesirable or unreliable. What I'm looking for is the ability to create a bootable disk (windows are ok, doesn't have to be a mac) to mount my disk unencrypted.
source to share
You have two options: 1. Install WDE on a separate Mac and use Target Disk Mode to remotely mount the source disk. 2. Install WDE on a bootable external drive. Then just boot with that, mount the original drive (enter the passphrase of course) and access the data.
There are many options for command line recovery. You can check the PGP knowledge base and find article 1018.
(disclaimer: I'm working for PGP)