Is filevault worth it, or is a normal passworded account safe enough?

[meady100]

Hi guys, just trying to weigh up whether its worth putting filevault on my Air, i know it introduces slightly longer login times. I only have the usual emails and stuff to protect which I use a passworded account for. Am I to assume that these are fairly easy to break in to, if FV is an option Apple now offer? Thanks!

 

[itickings]

Fairly easy, yes. It'll keep casual bystanders away, but unencrypted data is not safe at all given physical access to the computer.

If it is worth it or not depends entirely on how bad it would be if someone got access to your data and how likely it is that such a thing would occur.

What version of OS X are you running? Apple has offered FileVault in slightly different incarnations for quite a while.

 

[meady100]

Ah thats good to know. In that case I may well get it up and running then! Was also considering running FV 1 on an old Leopard machine, will research whether that is worth is later, I think! Thanks again!

 

[maflynn]

For me the risk vs. reward wasn't skewed in my favor. The performance was more then I was wiling to take. I don't travel that much so my MBP is more of a desktop at this point but when I do travel, I keep it with me most times. Plus my personal info, i.e., credit card, bank info is not stored there.

You can also create an encrypted disk image for such files