Getting rid of filevault - need some help

I'm trying to get rid of Filevault, but my computer doesn't have enough memory to disable it. I got myself an external hard drive and am now planning to move my home folder to the HD and disable Filevault. However, I just noticed that the sparsebundle for Filevault appears to be more than what the contents of my home folder is. Is this just because of the encryption, or am I missing something important?

By the way, if it affects anything, I am using Leopard right now.

Also, I just read that if I manually delete the sparsebundle, all the files that were encrypted will also be deleted. Does that mean that if I back-up my files in an external HD, I can just delete the sparsebundle (and my home folder with it), disable Filevault, and then put the files back from the HD?

Filevault can be a pain. Here's the Apple kb on disabling it.

Pretty dangerous tool FileVault. As set out Safe Mode is the way to go.


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1233250?start=0&tstart=0