Quote Originally Posted by Nurse Marcia View Post
This is a great thread! Thanks, WM.

Sounds like there are some very experienced people giving advice, so I have a question for you.

If your computer is protected with a 9 character strong password to access it, does that provide enough security to prevent a thief from even getting to your data if the computer is stolen?
Absolutely not. Full disk encryption is the only means to protect all of the data on your hard drive.

Otherwise, all that is required is to boot to a Ubuntu LiveCD and copy the data to a USD drive. Alternatively, the drive can be removed and placed in another computer or external enclosure and copied that way.

You can also create encrypted containers to files without encrypting the entire drive. But, I still recommend FDE. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201599)