Reduce encrypted folder size

[fzmann]

Espionage 3.6.2 user.

I see that in the application, the encrypted folder size can be adjusted, but only upwards (it seems).
Is there a way to reduce the size of the folder? For example, within a 50GB encrypted folder I only have 5 GB of data, and will probably not have more than 10GB. So i'd like to reclaim some disk space by reducing the size of the encrypted folder down to, say, 20GB.

Can this be done, or will I have to move the contents around, delete the encrypted folder and start anew?

Thanks

[zsolt]

Hello

There is a difference between image capacity and image size. The capacity is the amount of data the sparse bundle disk image can "grow", and the size is the actual size on the disk, you can see both values by clicking onto small "i" near folder name in the Espionage folder list, then clicking onto "adjust folder size" button.

There will be a small overhead between the amount of data protected and the actual size of the disk image, but it is just a few MBs

So "decreasing the size" is not necessary, unless you put a lot of data into the folder, in which case the disk image will grow to accommodate it, but will not shrink if you delete the data from the folder.

This is why you have the reclaim unused space button which will shrink the disk image by deleting the metadata which was needed to accommodate the increased amount of data.

Let me know if you have further questions,

Rgds
Zsolt

[fzmann]

Zsolt,
Thank you for the reply.

I guess I'm confused. When the folder is unlocked, the size says 50GB which I take it to be the image's capacity, but when I add up the size of the contents it's a much lower amount (which Espionage also tells me, to your point). I want to lower the capacity of the image since my drive is starting to get full, and I don't need the image to be 50GB, but a lower amount like 20GB, knowing that the actual contents will be around 10GB.

I hope that makes sense.

Again, thank you,
fzmann

[zsolt]

Again, there is capacity and size. You want to lower the capacity but expect the size to be smaller as a result.
When you click onto "adjust folder size" button, the lower portion of the window which says "reclaim unused space" says....the disk image has xxx of data, and is xxx size on the disk. The second number is the actual size of the disk image on the disk, ie. this is the amount of data it uses on your disk.

In my case, it contains 2MB data and has 85 MB in size on disk...but this is because it is a test folder, so nearly empty, and therefore the discrepancy between the amount of data it contain and size on the disk is noticable. If I would add 200 MB of data into the protected folder, the size on the disk would grow maybe to 205MB so there would be 5MB of metadata.

Lowering the maximum capacity is not possible in Espionage, because it will not give you any benefit, you could do that by using disk utility but again, you would not gain much.

The reclaim unused space is another thing...say I added these 200MB of data, the size of the disk image on the disk grows from 85MB to 205MB. Now I delete these 200MB from the protected folder...the size on the disk would still remain 205MB because whereas the disk image automatically "grows" to accommodate more data it will not automatically shrink. But this is what you can do by hand if you click onto "reclaim unused space" button. But this makes sense only if you added and deleted some significant amount of data.

I hope this makes it clearer.

A friendly advice, if you are running so low on space on your boot disk, that 50 MB matters to you, then you will run sooner or later into trouble. I guess you are aware that OS X is creating memory swap files, the more applications you are running at once, or the more you run the Mac without reboot, the more of these pages you will have. If the OS X runs into situation where it needs the create a new swap file but it cannot things might get stuck.

Therefore I would suggest to leave at leat 5-10 GB of free space on the boot disk.

Let me know if you have further questions,

Rgds

Zsolt