File, what is the name of Apple's full disk encryption system?
Now, when a disk is set to be fully encrypted, it means that the entire disk is encrypted at the hardware
level.
And you don't need to be concerned with encrypting individual files on the hard drive when working with
very private information.
It's important to have your files and disk encrypted.
It's very easy to use target disk mode on a Mac to have a max internal hard disk appear on another computer.
If that disk is encrypted, then that this can't be read.
Just be aware with full disk encryption that you have the potential of losing access to all of your
data if you forget your password and lose your encryption key.
All right, to visually demonstrate how disk encryption works, I've set up two systems, one's got
disk encryption and the other doesn't, and I've booted them both up to recovery.
Now, keep in mind that when you boot to recover, you do not need to enter any passwords.
All right.
So let's go ahead and bring up disk utility on both.
And on this computer, you can see that when I click on Macintosh Hard Drive, it's active.
You can see that here it says unmount, which means that it's mounted.
And if I go to this system over here, you can see that Macintosh hard drive is kind of great out.
It says not mounted.
And over here, it says that it's encrypted.
And if you look over here, it says I can trace it.
And actually you can have a computer that is encrypted and you can move it to recovery and you can format
the disk.
And if that happens, then all the data is going to get wiped out.
So make sure that you have backups of everything.
Now, this goes for encrypted or not encrypted disks.
But I just wanted to point out that just because your disk is encrypted doesn't mean that it can't be
formatted in disk, utility boot up and recovery mode by someone that doesn't know username or password
of your Mac.
All right, so let's go ahead and quit disk utility and let's go to the terminal and I'm going to do
a listing of the volumes folder and you can see I've got the Macintosh harddrive showing.
And if I do a listing of volumes on this computer, you can see that the Macintosh hard drive is not
available.
All right.
So let's go to volumes, Macintosh Hard Drive and then users.
And if I do a listing, I can see the user's folder.
And since I'm route, I can go into the high Sierra user's folder and I can see their entire profile.
Now, any documents, pictures, anything?
Basically, I can copy these files to an external hard drive and then take them to my own computer and
do whatever I want with these files.
Now, even in the terminal, I can go into the documents folder and see that there's a file and then
I can go ahead and even take a look at the file.
And because the file is not encrypted, I can see clearly what the contents of the file are.
Now, again, on this encrypted machine, we do not have access to the Macintosh hard drive and therefore
all of the data is safe.
And the same thing would go if we took the hard drives out of these machines and attach them to another
computer.
If we put the target disk mode, it would it matter.
The drive on the right is safe and the drive on the left is not safe.
So anyway, that's a visual demonstration of disk encryption and how it can protect your data.