Auto lock feature

[martinc]

Hi,

Anyway to include an automatic lock feature? Maybe after 10 mins.

Love the app.
Martin.

[greg]

Hey martin, thanks for the question!

You might be interested in this thread. :)

[xfile80303]

I too am interested in an auto-locking feature.

The mentioned thread talks about locking when the computer is shutdown, user logs out & power failure, and talks about not being able to autolock folders which may be in use by an application... all good stuff, but I think there's still room for an auto-lock feature, and I'd personally love to see it implemented.

Specifically, consider this use case:

I have a folder with my documents in it.  This folder does not have any application associations. I would like to navigate to the folder, have it unlock as normal, open files and work with them, but after some configurable period of inactivity (and no open files) have the folder lock (with the added bonus of not staying open if the access is only a Finder browser window).

This seems like a reasonable, and common, use case.

Thoughts?

Levi

[mike]

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.

[xfile80303]

Understood, but couldn't all those background tasks be notified similarly (if not identically) to a request to "eject" (unmount) the volume?

[marty]

Understood, but couldn't all those background tasks be notified similarly (if not identically) to a request to "eject" (unmount) the volume?

Unfortunately, OS X does not provide for a safe, consistent way for any tasks -- background or otherwise -- to stop what they are doing at a moment's notice "cleanly". Unmounting is very specific: no files may be open, and without a clean stop and proper closure of files things could get messy: that's why OS X doesn't allow an unmount in those cases without "forcing" processes to quit -- leaving potential updates to never be made. Even the OS X processing done at logout and shutdown time can be interrupted because a process doesn't stop when it's asked, and they're being asked "nicely".

We'll certainly keep your request in mind in the event that OS X can handle this kind of request properly and without error to your data.