Thx. I am a relatively new Mac user and didn't realize this existed. Will try this. Any weird issues or edge cases to consider before turning this on ?
Yes. FileVault is awesome, but if your encrypted filesystem ever gets corrupted (which can and does happen), your encrypted data is useless and your volume is toast until it's wiped and re-imaged. Surprisingly I have never had this happen, but more than one friend has reported losing their data due to FS corruption with FileVault enabled. I suppose it can be mitigated with a solid Time Machine/backup routine.
Yep, happened to me and I've never used FileVault again.
I had a TimeMachine backup too but hadn't synced recently and ended up doing a bunch of hackery to recover the un-synced data :(
I much prefer 2FA & revocable certificates on remote accounts so I'm not worried about unauthorized access, and anything else important is encrypted independently.
I have used FileVault since it was released many many years ago. In the beginning there was a fairly severe performance penalty, but it's solid now. I highly recommend using it. On an SSD, at least, but spinning disks + FileVault is border line unusable IMO.