I had a similar problem today. I installed osxfuse and ntfs-3g via Homebrew, but I didn't install the kernel extension. I got a similar error message trying to mount an NTFS drive in RW mode. After installing the osxfuse kernel extension (instructions are available via brew info osxfuse
), the error went away. Strangely, it didn't happen the first time I mounted an NTFS drive using ntfs-3g.
I hope this helps.
Truecrypt's main selling point is that it runs on windows, various flavours of linux and OSX, too. From their website, it says that they offer many encryption techniques each with a minimum of 256-bit encryption.
FileVault uses XTS-AES 128-bit encryption, which is a different form of encryption, but despite it's misnomer actually has 256 bits of encryption.
FileVault is tightly integrated into the OS, so it's probably easier to use. If your use case is over many computers with different OS's on them (windows, linux, as well as mac) then I'd go for Truecrypt for continuity.
It's important to remember that the security of these drives is limited by the length of your password. This article has an interesting discussion for further reading.
Does Truecrypt decrease the performance of the OS comparing to Filevault?
Without any testing whatsoever, I would guess that they're comparable in speed, since they are both on-the-fly encryption techniques, and perform as normal drives once unlocked.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that TrueCrypt also supports encrypting just a portion of your hard drive, say a folder or a group of folders.
Filevault doesn't support encryption of individual files/folders. However, Disk Utility will allow you to create an encrypted image. (which can use either 128-bit OR 256-bit AES encryption)
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I would guess that the weakest link isn't the choice of formats, but your picking a decent password and not letting it get observed or captured.
In the general case where there is a system tool and a third party one, I usually start with the tool that is built in until I have good, definite and enumerable reasons to not use the default tool.
Go with encrypted disk images in the case you have set out.