
Next, at the login screen click your account icon:
SETTING UP MAC RECOVERY KEY MAC
The question mark is your key to unlocking a Mac that’s protected by FileVault. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t provide a single set of straightforward instructions for how this works in a single place for the multiple cases you might encounter.
SETTING UP MAC RECOVERY KEY HOW TO
(If you can’t immediately find your Recovery Key or remember whether you chose the iCloud escrow option, read “ Is your macOS FileVault Recovery Key current? Here’s how to check.”)Īpple relies on the FileVault Recovery Key to let you regain access to your Mac or to reset your account password when you’ve forgotten it. In those cases, you may be unable to gain access without knowing your Recovery Key or if you are able to log into iCloud to retrieve a version Apple holds in escrow for you. Or something in macOS breaks or is corrupted in the account login process or files (unlikely, but it happens). Suppose you forget your password (unlikely, I hope!).

The strong security FileVault offers can also be a problem. Read our explanation from last year about how T2 and M1 Macs interact with FileVault.)

(With Intel Macs with a T2 Security Chip and on all M1 Apple silicon Macs, the drive’s contents are always encrypted, but the drive is mounted at startup without an additional step if you haven’t enabled FileVault. At that point, the Mac enters into its normal operation mode. That’s a dangerous situation if someone has physical access to your computer-either in your home or office or they’ve stolen it-because there are known and not-yet-discovered methods by which an attacker could try to mount the drive and read files.įileVault on all Macs puts an additional bar in place: your drive is encrypted and its files unavailable until there’s been a successful macOS login. When FileVault is enabled, the data on your startup drive is not immediately available, with just a password between an attacker and your files. FileVault hardens macOS by wrapping a layer of login protection around your data.
