“When you get a new Mac, how can you make sure you’ve set it up to be as secure as possible?” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld.
“If you walk through a completely fresh installation process, Apple tries to guide you into making the most-secure choices among alternatives,” Fleishman writes, “but it’s probably the worst time to try to sort out the options available and make those decisions.”
“A reader asked for advice for the next time they start from scratch, and I can offer that in this column. However, all of my suggestion can work just as well as later additions, whether you’re reinstalling OS X, installing and then migrating from a different Mac, or just continuing to use an existing installation,” Fleishman writes. “It’s better to set this up first, but it’s never to late to add layers.”
How to in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good tips, especially the info about making clones and backups routine. Also, you want to make your Mac secure: Get rid of Adobe Flash!
SEE ALSO:
How to keep your iPhone secure from both hackers and the government – March 8, 2016
How to configure a cheap, secure RAID backup system for your Mac – July 22, 2015
Not sure about full on FileVault 2 unless you have extremely food password documentation. Loss of a FileVault password or its corruption renders the hard drive data unrecoverable. I really like the idea of super duper and cloned backups Super duper makes functional duplicates of hard drives in surprisingly rapid fashion. Since they are functional copies they should be securely stored under lock and key somewhere. There is no better backup than a spare.
Glenn’s question was:
When you get a new Mac, how can you make sure you’ve set it up to be as secure as possible?
FileVault 2 has been proven reliable and fits the question. Decent backups should allow recovery if disk corruption messes up the FileVault encrypted volume. I like SuperDuper best for whole disk backups. But Carbon Copy Cloner is excellent.
The general rule: Have two backups that are made at least daily, depending up on the importance of your data. One is kept on-site and the other off-site. I’ve seen some lousy results from cloud services whereby backup data is lost or ruined. But in general, cloud services may qualify as one’s off-site backup.
As for user-error, that has turned out to be the one security factor most difficult to avoid or control. It has turned out to be the single most dangerous factor in any overall computer system. Awareness and training is the best preventative. There are also some heuristic and malware infection prevention tools that can help avoid social engineering. For storing one’s passwords, both 1Password and LastPass have excellent reputations and functionality.
A special hello to my *Ding*-bat stalker. I’d wish you a bad day. But every day is already bad for you. My day: Imaginative, just how I like it.
I’ve had SuperDuper backups that restored, but have not booted , when I ran the same backup and restore with CCC, it worked fine, so at the moment, I trust CCC more then Super Duper for reliable backups.
Another Carbon Copy Clone (CCC) fan, here.
Always have a fully bootable cloned drive OFFSITE, somewhere, under lock and key/controlled storage. My offsite clone is never more than a week old — in other words, with regards to the worst case recovery scenario, and I am forced to recover using my offsite bootable clone, at MOST, I will lose only one week of data (this is acceptable for my usage and recovery needs, but may be too **loose** for others and their particular data recovery needs).
The one MAJOR fly in the ointment, with regards to either recovery from a cloud or FileVault account, or other similar backup means — in the event of your PERSONAL incapacitation (serious illness and/or unable to communicate) or sudden death, what is the “next best move” by those who will NEED access to specific datas/backups that are password protected (this applies to general login credentials, too)?
Have you implemented a predesignated backup plan for YOU, personally, should you **suddenly** be rendered “out of action,” wholly unexpectedly?
Niffy