"Tight" security question with Espionage in "all Mac OS mode

[Jezza]

I am just trialling Espionage and so far, it looks promising.

But I have the following questions / required clarifications after having looked up a few forum posts. Basically my aim is that specific data on my hard drive (and then copied onto a backup location - external HDD or offline/cloud storage) is unaccessible to anybody else than me.

If I understand correctly, encrypted folders use the standard/native Mac OS encryption with sparse images/bundles "wrapped in a clever way" that allows Espionage to do its magic such as application data locking, auto-unlock, white-listing, etc.

1- I read on the forum that this means data on the hard drive is always encrypted (it only gets mounted as a volume and decrypted on the fly and stored in RAM when unlocked - but the actual HDD data is unlocked). Is this correct?

2- Does that mean that if I have many large encrypted folders - all unlocked, this will greatly increase RAM usage (to hold all this decrypted data)?

3- I understand that there are lots of requests for timed or screensaver/sleep-triggered auto-locks (many messages from 2010 in forum) but this does not seem to have been implemented (yet?) as I could not see any mention of it in the app or help file. I understand the complexities of it (if a document from an encrypted folder is open, etc.) and the usual answer seems to be "to enable the sleep/screensaver password in the Security System Preferences" (which I already do). I completely understand the rationale behind this: if a thief resets my user password to be able to login (will need to log off/restart) or access the HDD from another machine, they wont be able to access my RAM, which is where the decrypted information resides.
However my question is with regards to the sleepimage file, which - as I understand - contains a dump of the RAM to disk. Does this mean that the Espionage-protected data (all unlocked folders) will implicitly be dumped in its RAM-DEcrypted state to disk as part of the overall RAM dump/copy?

4- If the above is true. Is it sufficient to set the Security System Preference "Use Secure Virtual Memory" to true to be protected (i.e. the unlocked Espionage folders will be dumped in their decrypted state as part of the overall RAM, which is in turn fully encrypted somehow by Mac OS)?

5- In terms of backup, there should not be any of the problems above: if I keep to the recommendation of either using the built-in backups or ensure that the folders are locked when running the backup, only the encrypted data should be copied?

Thanks in advance (and sorry for the long message!)

Jezza

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[Jezza]

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