Researching and testing the latest Snow Leopard (10.6.8) bought me to a new approach in OEM user footprint deployments.
Due to the larger capacity of HDD's that can be deployed to a MBP (MacBook Pro) which fits nicely into the 750Gb size right now, I have noticed a wonderful resolution for data deployment and retention.
This involves the creation of 2 partitions, one for the OS proper plus application installations and the second partition for data storage and work related usage. As an example it could be broken down to a 250Gb partition for the OS and apps, while leaving a 500Gb partition for data storage.
Logical and workable solution that allows incremental OS footprints to be deployed to the primary partition (250Gb) as OS X Lion comes out and at the same time removing the overhead of redeploying the data from backups - not that backups are not undertaken.
So now my question to the group.
Has anyone successfully encrypted a secondary partiton with Whole Disk Encryption without the need to create it on the primary partition?
Certainly no different to having a USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt external hard drive attached to your system, only another partition and PGP can certainly do this from an engineering point, not a lot needs to be done to implement this only the logistics of EFI and boot validation from PGP upon user entry.
The alternative via Virtual Disk is an overhead that does not fit into a consumer or corporate infrastructure as both users would be heavily bound to user dependency (opening a file, scripting a solution) in this writes opinion and thus seems to create a flaw in OEM delivery.
Any insights or suggestions are welcome and if a resolution from any quarter can help me I am totally grateful. Maybe Symantec/PGP engineers can come up with a new feature set for us :) who knows... just a thought.