Password protect a folder

Doyler92

Hello.

I have a folder on my laptop which I need to protect so nobody else can see the contents of the folder without a password. Is it possible to password protect a folder on Windows 10?

Thanks for your help.

mordeith

Doyler92 wrote: »

Hello.

I have a folder on my laptop which I need to protect so nobody else can see the contents of the folder without a password. Is it possible to password protect a folder on Windows 10?

Thanks for your help.

Not sure if you can do it natively but you could anyways zip it and password that. Be a pain if you were accessing it regularly though

Fysh

You can't password-protect a folder against local users on the computer. You can modify the Security permissions on the folder to remove the "Users" group, which will prevent a standard user account from being able to access it - but it's usually possible for an Administrator account to override this. If you do this, make sure to add an explicit entry for your username with "full control" permissions, otherwise you may also lose access.

Things to bear in mind:
1) If you have physical access to boot a computer from a DVD or USB stick, it's pretty easy to reset the password for a local (i.e. non-Microsoft) account on a computer.
2) Even without resetting an account password, NTFS file permissions are only enfored within Windows systems - so booting to a Linux live CD and attaching the disk may well allow someone to view the contents of that folder.

If you create a compressed file containing the folder's contents using a tool like 7-zip, you can set a password and encryption type to use - AES-256 is an industry standard and should resist even fairly robust snooping attempts.

Bear in mind that, if you opt for this approach, every time you extract the folder contents, you should make sure to clean up any temporary files created during the extraction process once you are finished using/changing the files.

oisin

You could try something like Truecrypt (now no longer supported but still around) or VeraCrypt both free, to create an encrypted folder which needs a password to access.

TestLink

TrueCrypt

No longer supported. But still safe. Download it from the following link.

https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm

ItHurtsWhenIP

TrueCrypt isn't really being developed/supported any more though is it?

As oisin suggested above - use it's successor VeraCrypt. This had a update last year.

Jan_de_Bakker

mordeith wrote: »

Not sure if you can do it natively but you could anyways zip it and password that. Be a pain if you were accessing it regularly though

Out of interest how secure is encrypting a zip file ?

Like with WinRAR ... the in built encryption there ? can it easily be cracked ?

ItHurtsWhenIP

Jan_de_Bakker wrote: »

Out of interest how secure is encrypting a zip file ?

Like with WinRAR ... the in built encryption there ? can it easily be cracked ?

7 Zip does 256 bit AES, which is pretty damned secure (NSA maybe).