There have been a number of laptop thefts at gun/knife point in my neighborhood recently. I'm backing up all my data frequently, but wouldn't want a thief to have access to my personal information like bank statements, personal pictures, etc, stored on my laptop. If I set "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" in Security of System Preferences, does this really mean there's no way for somebody else to gain control apart from re-formatting the drive?
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Are my data read protected in case of theft if I set "require password to wake"?
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They'd have to gain your password. Make sure it's fairly strong and that the computer's not set to auto-login on startup (otherwise you remove that layer of security) and you should be fine unless they steal it while it's awake and make sure they get the data without shutting the lid (unlikely, because the first thing they'd do is close it and run, if it's not already shut).
jW
jW
no. Even if they can't break your password, they can just read your hard disk with another OS X install.
The thing to do is only encrypt the files that need protecting. Your web bookmarks, music and so on probably don't need encrypting, but if you work in a sensitive industry/Government job, then maybe being overly cautious is better. Make sure you back up first and a lot before you encrypt anything though!