I had tons of problems with File Vault 2, on a multitude of machines. And I ended up removing it from all of my machines but one, which I take with me when I travel. I firmly believe that FV2 is half baked, and not reliable.
In addition, Apple’s ‘logical drive’ software implementation is currently incomplete in the Disk Utility. Resorting to Terminal for removal of logical drives as I recently had to do is insanely bad, and downright scary.
To add insult to the injury, FV2, and logical drive structures are not implemented across the board. Try connecting a FV2 drive to your Airport Extreme to share. Sadly, logical unencrypted partitions also don’t work.
I recently ended up with damaged data on my FV2 encrypted external hard drive. Disk Utility reported that it cannot repair the drive, and I spent 3 solid days retrieving 400 gigs of data due to repeated reading attempts from the encrypted hard disk. Yet, there was nothing wrong with the hardware. After removing the encryption and the logical drive structure, I copied the data right back in a couple of hours, and all has been fine since.
Finally, I believe HFS+, whether it is journaled or not, is long in the tooth, and simply does not provide a solid foundation to build world-class encryption.
BOOTNOTE: ZFS could have been a good replacement for the HFS+, which is “long in the tooth”. Unfortunately, Apple dropped its support for ZFS in 2009.
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