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Old 04-13-2018, 09:51 AM   #3
serr
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 12,562
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You need to understand what Filevault actually is.
This encrypts your hard drive volume. This is security against physical access to your hard drive. It would not protect you online or in any other way. Specifically protection from physical access to your drive. (Hence the comment about a good fit for someone like an FBI agent or CEO with business secrets on their machine that someone would be motivated to steal and access.)

Anything in or out of the drive is encrypted/decrypted and this is obviously a performance hit. A fast machine with a SSD might not be fully crippled but you would be sacrificing significant performance none the less.

If you ARE at risk of theft and theft of sensitive data, then you absolutely want to make this kind of security first priority. Either put up with a slower machine for secondary uses or use a machine with no expensive company secrets on it instead. Bricking an OS update/install is an acceptable risk if this kind of security is a priority.

High security against physical access and theft is a lower use case and absolutely a faux pas to have enabled by default for the average user.

And Apple are screwing up. Updates are crashing and bricking the OSX install in filevault enabled systems. They currently are aware something is very wrong as they shut down their update server some 24 hours ago and it's still down. So we have users that clicked on an update and now their even their USB OSX installer will not bail them out because 10.13 requires a connection to their server for current updates (even if you have made a full USB installer). Not a good look!

Today, if you try updating from 10.13.3 to 10.13.4, a download will appear to start, your system will reboot into the installer mode, and it will quietly give up and restart back to 10.13.3. But if you had filevault enabled it will now hang on startup and you will be in "paperweight" mode. Seen a number of systems with this happen now. One in front of me right now. Apple's server is still down.



Do what you will with this info and believe it or not. I see things, I spill the beans on them. I've never seen Apple crashing and burning this hard before. This is Windows-esque stuff.

I tried playing along even with the extra work and feature regressions but I'm back to recommending avoiding both 10.12 and 10.13 again. (10.13 was supposed to be a bug fixed 10.12)
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