Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

With Tiger coming up shortly, it’s now more important than ever to keep your porn collection secure. It’s only a matter of time until someone using a shared Mac performs an innocuous Spotlight search that suddenly turns up a cornucopia of nasty porn associated with you. Depending on who finds it, you could get a visit from social services, suffer a divorce or breakup, be outed, be labeled a pervert, lose your job, or land in jail. In this instance, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.

Hiding such things from Spotlight is a good idea. To do that, you can create an encrypted disk image that is password protected to keep nosy users out, and the contents of the image don’t appear in Spotlight unless the image is mounted.

To begin, go to the /Applications/Utilities folder (press command-shift-u in the Finder) and start up Disk Utility. Click File, New, and Disk Image from Folder. This will create something called a sparse image. Sparse images are initially only as big as the data they contain and have the advantage of expandability later.

Select the folder where your porn is contained and press the Image button. Name the image. Select read/write from the Image Format drop-down. Click the Encryption drop-down and choose AES-128 (recommended). Select a save location and press Save.

You will then be prompted for a password. This is the password Disk Utility will use to encrypt the data and you will have to enter it each time the image is mounted. Do yourself a favor and make the password hard to guess. Do yourself another favor and uncheck the box for Remember password (add to Keychain). It really defeats the purpose of encrypting and password protecting an image if you’re going to automate its access with Keychain. Click OK after you enter your new password.

A new disk image containing your collection in encrypted form will be created. When you double-click the image to mount it, you will be prompted for the password. Drag and drop new porn onto the image as desired for permanent safekeeping.

Over time, your porn collection will probably continue to grow and will become larger than the sparse image you just created. As I said before, sparse images can be expanded to any size you need, but the drawback is that you have to do it through the command line. Why Apple doesn’t add a dialog in Disk Utility to adjust image sizes, I’ll never understand.

Open Terminal and enter this command:

hdiutil resize -size xxx /path/to/porn.dmg

… where xxx is the size you want to the image to be in megabytes or gigabytes. For example, 500mb or 4.7gb.

Now your porn is protected from prying eyes and accidental finds. Backups are a simple one-file copy operation. You stay out of jail, you get to keep your job, your wife, your kids, and nobody knows you’re really gay. I love it when technology helps us.