AMCarter3 wrote:
...
My need for security is not as high as some people have expressed on this Forum. However, I am interested in Filevault .... I really don't have any practical knowledge of the Filevault installation process or the extent to which today's version gets in your way or slows things down. Is it really as transparent to the user as some have described on this forum? Does it simply boil down to installing it and using a more robust password for logging in?
Nothing to install.
System Preferences -> Security -> FileVault and enable it.
NOTE: Make sure you save the aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffff key that gets generated in a safe place (I use a password vault with a very long password that is itself encrypted and replicated to other systems).
When you boot, you will be prompted for your password before it will finish the boot so it can unlock the drive and access the operating system.
After that I do not notice it. And if you have a Mac with an i5, i7 or similar CPU (which is like most the last 5 years), chances are you have hardware support for the encryption/decryption, so that FileVault overhead becomes noise.
And bottom line, you do not need to worry about selling your Mac with its SSD, because once you reformat it and destroy the aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffff key, it will be very expensive (big government budget level expensive) to get to your old data on the SSD (and even then they may not succeed).
Do not think of it so much as "security" as dealing with SSD and modern hard disk hidden behaviors in such as way that a sold, lost, or stolen Mac will not give someone access to your data. Data that while not super sensitive, may be the kind that might let them access your financial empire, or affect your family if used incorrectly.