Messages

Thanks Marty,

If you look at the picture, it seems the program doesn't read the folder, this is the problem?

Hi Grosso, it looks like the Passport device was ejected while the folder was still unlocked. All the unlocked folders belonging to the external drive must be closed before ejecting the drive or what'll be left is a pointer that you're seeing right now. This happens because Espionage never had time to lock/close the folder for you.

Can you try the following:
   1) Go to Finder
   2) Choose Go > Go to Folder... in the menu bar
   3) Type or paste "/Volumes/EspionageMounts/" (without the quotes)
   4) Press return or click Go

Open the folder with your name and then see if there are any folders in this path. If there are, open any one of them and see if your "Photo Booth" folder is there.

Also, did you ever use Espionage to back up your encrypted folders?

Please let me know.

Hi Nicolas,

I responded to your email already. I'll summarize it for everybody here.

We were not able to find any causes behind the slowdown, it doesn't mean it is not there for certain users who may have a large mailbox or undergoing some tasks in Postbox/Thunderbird such as creating an index or a cache file. Our tests shows no major performance drops with Espionage and Postbox/Thunderbird. It is normal to see *some* drop in performance but it should not be significant. If you notice that Postbox is doing some disk operations, wait for it to complete and then see if it'll speed up over time.

Espionage puts some folders that Postbox/Thunderbird uses in an encrypted file system and it'd be transparent to those apps, it shouldn't slow down the overall performance of those apps in any way unless the apps are doing some inefficient disk I/O operations. This would be applied to other apps like Postbox as well.

There is not much we can do to speed things up for Postbox, the encryption protocols are built into the Mac OS X and it is the same for all apps, it should already be maximized.

If the performance loss is not acceptable after waiting a bit, I'd suggest not using Postbox with Espionage at all.

I'm sorry that I do not have a better answer for you or others who have the same slowdown with Postbox/Thunderbird.

Hi Levi,

You're welcome.

Just so you'd understand, even if we add this option, the data is still exposed to every other apps. It wouldn't just be restricted to a specific app. For an example, as long as BBEdit app remains open, every other apps will still see the data. So, the benefit of this specific feature is not a major improvement from the "unlock at login". The other problem is that if you tell Espionage to lock down the folder after BBEdit is closed and you were writing some data to the files in that folder, the file can be damaged as the result of the forced lock. That's why the unlock at login is usually safer.

Hi,

Yes, as long as you're the only Espionage user, you can use the same single-user license on all of your Macs. We only count towards users, not computers.

The family license is for allowing you to share the same license with up to 5 family members in the same household and each family member can use the same license for all of their Macs.

Hi Levi,

The problem is that there is almost never a moment where there'll be no activity on your computer. For an example, spotlight indexing, time machine backing up,  and so on are being done in the background without you noticing them. A finder browser window is an access and an activity to your folder, it has to refresh to make sure you're not viewing an outdated list. If it wasn't doing that, you'd have no idea if a file was moved, deleted or updated elsewhere.

The encryption process is sensitive to any changes and even a slight bit of data can interrupt the entire data stream, so forcing the encryption to stop in the middle of the stream can be very dangerous and harm the data integrity.

However, we can understand why the auto-lock feature would be useful and we'll look into it.

HI Levi,

I do understand and I also want the same feature for myself. That feature request is something we're looking into for the future but I have no timeframe on when we'll be able to implement it. Thank you for letting us know that this would be useful for you.

Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with (beside this feature request, of course :) ).

I ran the diagnostic tool as requested and I've submitted the report. Please let me know what's the outcome.

Regards
Nicolas

Hi Nicolas, I received your report and responded to you over email. I did see something wrong but it may not be related to this issue at all, we're still looking into this situation for you.

That is what I thought. I do recommend try again with Espionage but my guts are telling me that the flash drive may be dying or it just can't handle the stress of high workload being put on it by Espionage.

Can you tell me what you're trying to do with the USB stick, is it to store backups or are you using Espionage to encrypt the data on the drive? Having Espionage back up to your USB stick is much less stressful on the USB stick but if the USB stick suddenly dies, you're left out without any backups. I assume this is what you meant for multiple backup profiles, to be able to back up to different locations at the same time? Or did you meant backing up specific folders to different places?

There are other apps that can do what you're asking, there are some free apps here. You can have Espionage back up to the local drive and use the backup app to back up your backups to your USB stick.

Hi Levi,

The whitelist isn't what you think it is and I apologize for the confusion. It doesn't allow the application to bypass the password prompt but merely allow it to view your encrypted folder. One use for this is to allow backup apps to backup your encrypted folders without asking you for the password each time and you can do this by white-listing it.

It is not yet possible to do what you're asking because the password is essential to decrypting your folder. We might consider making this easier to work with in the future.  

At this moment, to do what you're asking, you have to enter the password each time.

Thank you - I had already tried checking the app info and it says "Friday, 25 March 2011 20:12". I knew that couldn't be right as it would have mean I'd had it more than a month. I notice now though that is the date on your screenshot ...  :)

Oops, that was silly of me. It's the date when it was built, I meant the modified time but that is not entirely accurate either. There is no way of knowing it now until you're in the last three days.

Is it possible to see how many days trial I have left?  Iv'e lost track and forgotten when I installed it.

Hi Fuglin,

It will let you know (via the app's notification system) when the trial expires in the last three days of the trial, the total trial limit is 14 days.

What you can do, is open your Applications folder and right click (or control + click) on Espionage to select "Get Info". Look at the modified date under the General section, it should match the first time you installed Espionage.

Hi Nicolas,

I apologize about that, I was focusing too much on the email part and not the overall post. ;)

That is definitely interesting, we can eliminate that as the cause. I have just tried Espionage with Postbox Express, no issues there.

If you still have Postbox with Espionage; please run a diagnostics report for us after running PostBox for a few minutes, so that we can see what's going on in the background. You can download our diagnostics tool from here:
    http://www.taoeffect.com/other/TEDiagnosticTool.app.zip

In the Diagnostic tool, when it ask for the description of the problem, add "Forum: Thunderbird slows under Espionage", so that we can connect the dots.

(I did a quick search and did not find other posts related to this subject, but I think remember at least another one... excuse me for not following that thread.)

Description: sometimes you want to launch an app with folders associated to Espionage disk images and the beach ball appears for about a minute, with the app bouncing at the dock. After that minute, the app stops bouncing, you launch it again, and everything works fine.

The "maybe" new information: I have notice that this problem is easier to reproduce if you have several image in Espionage to mount. I think that the cause might be to close an app with some Espionage images associations and relaunch it while Espionage while it's still unmounting the folders (for example).

In short: It might be that while Espionage is mounting or unmounting images, if you launch an app that needs access to those disk images, Espionage shows us the spinning ball for about an entire minute.

Hope this helps,  :)
Bernak

Hi Bernak,

Does it happen to every apps, or just a few apps? Did you ever get any prompts to unlock your folders? Do you notice any slow performance with any other apps, or is it just Espionage?

I'm not experiencing the same issues here but that doesn't mean it's not there since I have an SSD that might be too fast to detect any freezes.

I use CrashPlan for offline (onsite/offsite) and online backups. I also use SuperDuper for bootable backups.

I have whitelisted both applications at Espionage's Tool menu->Ignore List->Add Application->Select "Whitelisted".
Will this allow CrashPlan/SuperDuper to access the contents of my Espionage'd folder at any time for backup? Backup happens automatically every 15 minutes and I'm not always on the computer to unlock the folder.

Unfortunately Espionage's backup system is based in rsync, which has issues with Time Capsule and other NAS. Backups take forever and get corrupted almost immediately. It even causes the Finder and Espionage to hang while backing up to the Time Capsule or NAS. I had to wait 10 minutes for each process to reactivate in order to disable the native backup system. I had to reformat the NAS as the Finder wasn't able to delete many of the files.

Espionage needs an option to allow whitelisted backup applications to access the contents of the encrypted folders on demand and relock the folder automatically when it is no longer accessed by the backup application.

Please consider adding this option in a future release of Espionage.

Hi pmcarrion,

We received an email from you about this, I replied to your email about this.

The short answer is that by whitelisting both apps, it will allow CrashPlan/SuperDuper to access the encrypted folders to backup if it wasn't unlocked yet. It will not however allow those apps to access the decrypted contents inside the folder.

If you want to always back up the encrypted/locked folders, what you can do is tell Espionage to back up your data into a local "backups" folder and then you can use your own tools to back up that "backups" folder. In this case, you do not have to wait for Espionage to unlock or lock, the backups will always be there, in a accessible state for your backup apps to process.

We'll consider your request about adding the ability for Espionage to remember the password for the locked folders for specific apps and have it lock after the apps are closed. Thank you for letting us know that this would be useful for you.

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for sharing the email from Postbox. We'll investigate into this.

My understanding is that it may be related to the mail indexing, both encryption and mail indexing combined can slow down the overall system performance.

I have an SSD and I have noticed no performance slowdown with Sparrow, so it is likely that the slower the hard drive, the more noticeable the performance degradation is with Espionage.

If we find that it is not compatible, we'll consider the request to remove it.

Thank you once again for your help.