I’m a proponent of using FileVault. Depending on what model of Mac you have, when you turn on the machine you can press CMD+F5 to either hear a series of beeps or spoken announcements indicating where you are (e.g. one beep to indicate that you’re being asked for your username, two beeps to confirm that the username was entered correctly and you’re now being asked for the password, and three beeps to indicate that all the information was entered correctly and the machine is now booting up). This is all explained when you’re setting up FileVault with VoiceOver enabled. Of course, you can login without pressing CMD+F5 if you’ve memorized what to do and don’t need audible feedback.
FileVault makes your machine much more secure and in my opinion doesn’t impact the user experience at all. FileVault prevents any unauthorized person from getting at your data without the correct password or recovery key. Another benefit of encryption comes in when you choose to give away or sell your machine. Without encryption turned on, if you don’t want the machine’s new owner to be able to recover your data, then you need to erase your drive by writing data to every part of the drive. This can take many hours, and might not even be effective with flash storage. With encryption, this shouldn’t be necessary. Chances are you’re already using a device that is using data encryption. For example, iOS devices encrypt a lot of your important data by default. Information overload: By default, you’ll log in with your normal username and password and you’ll get a recovery key that can be used if you don’t have the password. You can also grant other user accounts the right to authenticate when the machine is powered on. Once the machine has been turned on and unlocked, any user can log in and out normally. The functionality of the Guest account, however, will be impacted; guests can only access a special secure mode where they can only access Safari. It’s sort of like starting up from the recovery partition of your Mac. You can store the recovery key with Apple as well as storing it yourself. If you’re feeling very adventurous, you can use the fdesetup command in the terminal (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/fdesetup.8.html) to configure many more parameters, including changing/deleting/validating the personal recovery key. Be sure to only do this if you know what you’re doing and have good backups. It’s not necessary for normal FileVault operation. Grant On Jan 18, 2015, at 12:26 PM, Agent086b <agent0...@internode.on.net> wrote: Hello all, are there any disadvantages in using File Volt? After learning yesterday that it is easy for anybody to re-set my Mac password I am now thinking I should use File Volt. Thanks as always for any great advice. Max -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
