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Help! Get data off non-admin account FileVault-encrypted

Although that is a different issue, I am aware that I have already posted in a thread about being unable to log in. I'm a bit more desperate now and want to get off the data! I have many accounts on my Leopard 10.5.4 system. FileVault does not encrypt the admin account. I have to get the data from a FileVault-encrypted non-administrator account. How do I remove the info from it now? I receive the message "Operation not supported on socket" when I double-click it in Disk Utility. Is there another method to acess the data and mount the volume? Please help.

Best Answered by

Amanda Wong

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

When there are additional users on your Mac, their information is also encrypted when you log in as an admin and enable FileVault. Users can unlock the encrypted disk with their login password. If you find the volume is unmounted in Disk Utility, you can run commands in Terminal to manually mount it.

You should log in with an admin account and remember the password to unlock FileVault. The first step is to launch Terminal from the macOS Utilities folder, then, run the command below to mount the sparse bundle directly with sudo:

sudo hdiutil attach /Users/username/username.sparsebundle

Enter the password when asked. After it is mounted on the Desktop, you can create a new folder somewhere on your hard drive and copy all the files across to that folder.