October 25, 2003: Mac OS X Panther arrives on Macintosh computers, bringing a number of useful new features.

Exposé lets users instantly view all open windows at once. The new iChat AV allows people to talk with audio and video as well as text. Plus, the Mac OS upgrade makes Safari Apple’s default web browser for the first time.

In the olden days, when you wanted to replace your hard drive with a bigger one, you’d run a “secure erase” on it to completely remove any personal data. This would write zeros to the entire disk, overwriting anything already there.

But now, thanks to advances in storage tech, this no longer does the trick. (Not that you can change your own Mac SSDs now anyway.) The new secure-erase, says Apple, is to just encrypt your disk.

If you have a modern Mac, there’s almost no reason not to use FileVault, the all-disk encryption that’s built in to OS X. It doesn’t slow the computer down, it keeps your data safe and – if the machine is switched off – then even if a baddie pulls your drive he’s stuck with a useless chunk of silicon.

And now Apple has added one more convenience for the cautious user: authenticated reboots.

If you want to be sure your data is secure on your Mac, Apple has provided an easy way to do so. They’ve created File Vault, accessed via the System Preferences, to encrypt your startup drive with some heavy duty file security.

You’ll need OS X Lion or later, and you’ll have to have an OS X Recovery partition on your drive. This last bit is typically installed on newer Macs, anyway, but to test it out, reboot your Mac and hold the Command-R key down. If you see an OS X Recovery screen, you’re good to go.

Setting up FileVault is even easier than that. Just launch System Preferences and click on Security & Privacy to get started.

Mountain Lion includes over 200 new features. Some of them are dramatic and hard to miss while others are minor conveniences that don’t stand out immediately. Many of those big and small new features and improvements have a lot of appeal for business users.

Here’s a list of the many new features in Mountain Lion that can help professionals in almost any industry work smarter, more efficiently, and more effectively.

Last week I wrote a few tips about disk encryption, but I didn’t write about what to do with the startup disk on your Mac. I cannot think of any reason you shouldn’t encrypt your startup disk after the release of Mac OS X Lion. Apple has made it just to easy for you to encrypt your drive.  It is quick, fast and easy. I’ll show you how today.

With security becoming an ever more serious issue, keeping your files safe is more important than ever before. Using an encrypted disk image is an easy way to safely store away files, while keeping them in one consolidated location. In this video, I’ll show you how to set up encrypted disk images.