I'm in the same boat; been using FileVault since day one.

I just checked and, sure enough, my cleartext password is visible if I run:

  $ sudo cat /var/log/asl/* | strings | grep 'password ='

So if my laptop were lost or stolen not only would the encryption be worthless, but my login password is available too. This is a big hole.

Guess today's a good day to switch to FDE

And pray that it doesn't have a similar hole that gets discovered a few months down the line...

You're the one person I know, now. Most everyone I knew that cared to encrypt their laptops (to be clear: that includes my whole team) used PGP WDE. My impression of legacy "homedir" Filevault is that it randomly ate homedirs.

I used it for many years, so did many people I know. Never got any "impressions" about it. It had its (many) flaws, but worked fine for me and was certainly better than no encryption at all.

UNCLE. I'm wrong. People used homedir Filevault.

I stand by (most of) my original comment.

"and was certainly better than no encryption at all."

Evidently not!

I never had legacy FileVault eat my homedir, but I did have issues with it forgetting what program was supposed to be used to open what kinds of files. Very strange, that.

From memory this was due to LaunchServices not waiting until the home directory was completely mounted, and thus launching with default prefs.

There was a workaround I had running for a while in a large deployment in the form of a logouthook that would copy the relevant prefs to a location that LaunchServices would find it before FileVault finished mounting the home directory.

There were a lot of corporate/education deployments running "legacy" FileVault who hadn't invested in PGP WDE or other commercial options, and I bet they haven't all upgraded instantly to the new FileVault when they moved to Lion.

>You're the one person I know, now.

Which means nothing at all, especially since hackers are not known for their extended social circles. It's also the dictionary definition of "anecdotal evidence".

If you want to gauge how many people used the old FileVault, well, one of the ways would be to compare old FileVault support mailing list traffic to the traffic for lists of other OS X offerings.