Right now there is an engineer somewhere at Apple whose balls are mysteriously aching, in sympathy with the fact that I so badly wish to plant my foot between them. This 1GB encrypted disk image now appears to be a big collection of random bytes, which is a real shame because until a few minutes ago it held every single damn photo I’ve taken the last few months.

On top of being absolutely livid about lost data and time, I am now hellishly concerned that the same thing could happen to my home folder, which is likewise just an encrypted sparse image [AKA FileVault] that I must now assume is vulnerable to the same catastrophic failure.

Oh well, guess I’ll just have to back-up more often. Ha ha ha. Isn’t it funny when people say that, as though it’s actually a realistic expectation that the average person has means to back up 50GB+ on a regular basis?

… meanwhile, the next day…

Things that have failed so far:

• Mounting (obviously)
• Repairing unmounted volume with DiskUtil. I get the following:

  

  Translation: Your disk can not be fixed because it is broken.

• Converting to another type of volume. My only option here was compressed DMG because theoretical maximum size of the original sparseimage was set to 250GB. Converting to unencrypted/compressed dmg file takes a very very long time, and leaves me with a second unmountable, unrepairable image.

Now that I at least have an unencrypted DMG there is possibly some tool out there that will let me me scan for content and retrieve at least some of my data, but I am too pissed off to continue with this just now. I’d rather just bitch about it.

The moral of this story: Some time, when you least expect it, your computer will screw you. Also, encrypted disk images (including FileVault) may have greater risks attached to their use than simply forgetting your password.

UPDATE: Just opened the original broken image file in Jujuedit, to discover that the last 99.999% of the content is set to zero. This is a bad bad thing, and I now believe it is extremely unlikely that I will find a tool to convert 1 billion zeros into anything remotely resembling my original files.

Fuck you Apple, fuck you very much.