I've done armchair infosec and malware research for years and never felt the need to encrypt my drives, even when I was specifically being targeted by a prolific malware gang.
Trump's administration changed that. I now encrypt my drives.
Virtual1 is correct; doing this makes drive repair harder. This problem is alleviated by a reliable and robust backup scheme. With 2TB USB hard drives hovering around the $40 mark and Apple having what is hands down the best automated backup software in the industry built into mac OS, there is no reason not to have good backups (and plenty of reason to do so).
I have three external backup drives. One is a 2TB clone, created with Carbon Copy Cloner and updated weekly. The other two are 3.5 TB Time Machine backups I rotate.
In addition, I have two servers (one in Portland and one in Canada) that run remote backup software and automatically mirror my laptop every night, but that's overkill; I only do that because my entire livelihood is on my laptop and I happened to have two old (Core 2 Duo) computers I wasn't using.
