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My MacBook's HD started failing recently. Fortunately most of the data was properly backed up and most of the other important data could be retrieved by hooking up the drive with the help of an external USB enclosure, but the problem is that my home directory has been encrypted with FileVault and I currently don't have easy access to a Mac.

So can the FileVault sparsebundle be somehow decrypted and read with Linux?

Eemeli Kantola
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Apparently Catacombae (aka "DMGExtractor") can read encrypted sparse images if you have the password.

soandos
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André
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Apparently DMGExtractor only reads sparseimages and NOT sparsebundles. See this for a kind explanation of the differences: http://www.ehow.com/info_12228366_difference-between-sparse-sparse-bundle.html

The read/write speed on encrypted sparseimages is even below EncFS. However the read/write speed on encrypted sparseimages is 10x - 20x times faster.

If there would be someway to read this sparsebundles outside a mac os x system.

Natsirt
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Sorry... there's no way. SparseBundles are Mac OS X Only. You could boot your Mac from an external USB or FireWire drive and access the files that way.

EDIT: Things have changed since I posted this answer years ago and now, apparently Catacombae's DMGExtractor can do this. Thanks to André for mentioning that, it's new to me!

Josh
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