Security


Mac OS X prevents non-privileged programs from directly accessing some disks in order to prevent ordinary users from reading data owned by other users. If you select such a disk, you will see a display similar to the following:

Clicking the lock button will bring-up a system authentication dialog like the one below

Once you have authenticated, iDefrag will start to read the disk structures, just as it does for disks that are not protected by Mac OS X security.

iDefrag may also ask you to authenticate when you defragment such a disk, and again when defragmentation finishes for a protected disk (we are aware that this is non-optimal, but it is not, in fact, under the direct control of iDefrag, and the authentication system used in iDefrag will be changing to promote better integration with its sibling, iPartition).

The full version of iDefrag may also require you to authenticate when you first use the on-line defragmentation feature, as it will need to repair the permissions on the on-line defragmentation helper tool.

Authentication can usually be avoided, if it proves a problem, by running the program as the superuser, although we do not really recommend doing this, particularly on shared machines, unless you fully understand the security implications.