Why would you want to turn on Filevault on an older Mac? Suppose you lose your Mac.

Filevault is so efficient that it's on by default on all Macs sold today. It's fast, secure, and thanks to hardware support built-into all Macs with the T2 chip, it protects you without impacting efficiency or performance. It uses XTS-AES encryption, the industry-standard used by Microsoft's BitLocker, and the open-source Veracrypt among many others.

Filevault is Apple's proprietary full-disk encryption technology.

Even though you’ve entered a user password, if you want to mount the Macintosh HD – Data partition, you’ll still be prompted for a FileVault-enabled user’s password again. The only odd thing about that is it doesn’t actually get you past FileVault encryption. Option 3: User FileVault-enabled user passwordĪnd if you do know a user password, of course, you can select the user, and then enter a password when prompted.

Then you can enter the FileVault recovery key for the drive. Well, you can click Forgot all passwords? Option 2: Use FileVault recovery key with no passwordīut let’s say you don’t want to wipe the drive necessarily-you just want to do other recovery mode stuff, and you don’t know any user passwords. You’ll then be prompted to join a wireless network, and then some kind of Internet recovery is downloaded and booted to, and then you’ll be back at recovery mode with a prompt to activate your Mac, and then with the opportunity to reinstall macOS on the freshly wiped drive. You can just click Recovery Assistant and then select Erase Mac….

Yes, that’s that menu item hidden in the top-left corner. If you don’t know the password to a user account and also don’t know the recovery key to FileVault, you can still use recovery mode to erase the current installation and reinstall macOS. Option 1: Erase without password or recovery key This prompt just seems like a rather odd choice, especially since it appears to act as almost some kind of firmware lock… except it’s not.

Without mounting the encrypted drive, you can’t really reset a password or have access to the data on the drive. T2-chip Macs have hardware-based encryption, and that encryption is able to turn on instantaneously. It’s not exactly clear what this password is for. Starting in macOS 10.15 (Catalina), Apple started requiring a password to do anything useful after booting into recovery mode:

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