How to set up FileVault protection on your Mac

If yesterday you could read the two posts that we dedicated to managing passwords in Safari, as well as setting a password in the Firmware of your computer, today we are going to explain how to activate the FileVault on your Mac.

FileVault protection consists of carrying out an encryption of all the data on the hard disk using a tool provided by OSX itself.

If you want to be sure your data is safe on your Mac, Apple has provided an easy way to do it. You have created the tool FileVault which we can access through System Preferences and with which we can encrypt the hard drive. To configure FileVault, just open the System preferences, Click on Security and privacy and follow the steps that are indicated on the screen.

Within the window that appears in Security and privacy, we must click on the upper FileVault tab. Once inside that tab, we will have to click on the padlock in the lower left corner to be able to unlock the tool using the administrator password.

Once inside the FileVault tab unlocked, we click on the button "Enable FileVault ..." at the top of the panel. Automatically we are shown a screen in which we are informed of a recovery key which will serve as a security measure in case you forget the password that you put later, because otherwise you will lose all the data on the disk.

When we continue, a new window appears asking us to say whether or not we want Apple to save that recovery key. In this way, in case we forget the password and also this recovery key, by calling Apple's technical service they could enter the system and recover it. It should be noted that this encryption key is kept fully encrypted on Apple's servers.

If we indicate that we want the recovery key to be saved in Apple, the system will ask us three security questions as it is done in the recovery of the Apple ID.

It should be noted that if we have more than one user account, it will ask us in intermediate steps to choose which user is going to perform the encryption.

After doing all the steps and providing the answer to the three questions, the system asks us to restart the computer to begin with the disk encryption.

More information - How to tell if your Mac is using FileVault from the command line