Leave in a locked but useable state

[Fed]

I'm a little paranoid about security and the idea of leaving the house with my MacBook unlocked, leaves a chill over me. As such, for things like Handbrake encodes, iTunes home sharing and file sharing, it presents a little hassle.

Is there a way to essentially lock the system, so if anyone were stumble across it they wouldn't be able to log in and have a look round the file system? You could argue that a thief could simply take out the hard drive and look at the volumes of unencrypted data, but we'll assume it's a rather lazy thief.

I suppose, as a practical example, I'd like to have a combination of Caffeine mixed with a locked system.

[hallux]

Set up Hot Corners (System Preferences -> Desktop and Screensaver -> Hotcorners in the bottom right) to turn on the screensaver, you only need one set up but you can choose what you want. Then in Security and Privacy set the timer for requiring a password to your preference (mine is 5 minutes).

When you want to turn on the screensaver and lock the screen, move the pointer to the corner you set up in hotcorners for starting the screensaver and leave it be.

[Tomorrow]

Originally Posted by hallux

Set up Hot Corners (System Preferences -> Desktop and Screensaver -> Hotcorners in the bottom right) to turn on the screensaver, you only need one set up but you can choose what you want. Then in Security and Privacy set the timer for requiring a password to your preference (mine is 5 minutes).

When you want to turn on the screensaver and lock the screen, move the pointer to the corner you set up in hotcorners for starting the screensaver and leave it be.

If you don't want to use hot corners you can simply place the lock icon in the menu bar. Click to lock.

[Fed]

I already have this particular feature setup. Correct me if I'm wrong but won't this eventually stop running processes and spin down the disk after x amount of inactivity? I know you can change energy savings but perhaps I've misunderstood what the hot corner thing actually does. If I run handbrake for twelve hours of encoding and hot corner it a few seconds after clicking go, will it carry on until the encoding has finished and then depending on the energy savings, it'll then kick in the timeout after x amount of time?

[hallux]

I don't believe Hotcorners does things any different than the energy preferences are set for. Your Handbrake encodes should run as long as your energy saver preferences are set to allow.