MacBook Pro Portable Genius, 5th Edition

Chapter 13: How Can I Protect My MacBook Pro’s Data?

Your MacBook Pro is valuable, and protecting it is important, but this chapter is about protecting the data on your MacBook Pro, which is even more valuable. If you lose a document on which you’ve been working, all the time and effort you’ve invested is lost. Although you can redo work on documents, you can’t replace photos. Think about how bad it would be if you lost your photo library. Then there’s personal data, such as financial information, that needs safeguarding. For all these reasons, you should take precautions to secure your MacBook Pro and its data.

Keeping Software Current

There are two good reasons to keep the software you use current. One is that software developers frequently develop revisions to improve the features of their applications and remove bugs. The other (and the reason this topic is included in this chapter) is that many applications, and most definitely OS X itself, play a large role in how secure your MacBook Pro and its data are. The bad guys—people who develop viruses and attempt to hijack your computer or steal your data—are always working on new ways to penetrate your computer. Most software developers try to limit your exposure to attacks in their software as much as possible. To keep up with all new attempts to compromise your computer, take advantage of the security improvements that are ...