Sometimes several people in a family use the same Mac. In this case, there’s very little a single person can do to protect his or her data other than to store it in a protected folder. Again, if you have little children using your Mac, it’s best to protect all folders under your Home folder using a tough password.
You can add more folders within the main password protect folder mac and keep a large amount of data safe within this structure. Also, it is easier to back up your password protected folder. You can just copy your entire password protected folder Mac to a drive and carry it with you, without worrying about anyone opening your folder by mistake.
This article describes the methods that you can use to password protect your folders Mac.
PASSWORD PROTECT A FOLDER
Mac OS X provides a fairly simple utility to password protect a folder, as follows:
1. Open Disk Utility
2. Click File, then New and Disk Image from Folder
3. Select the that you want to protect with a password
4. Select the encryption level you want for your folder. AES-128 encryption level is quite sufficient.
5. Click Save and provide your password twice. You can choose to have Password Assistant generate your password to ensure it cannot be easily guessed.
Disk Utility creates a disk image that contains the entire contents of your folder. To open this folder, double-click the .dmg file in the Finder tool. A password dialog box will appear. Once you supply your correct password, Finder will automatically un-encrypt your data and mount the image as a disk.
Once the image is mounted, create a folder inside the encrypted disk image. Create an Alias (not a symbolic link, but a Finder alias from the File menu) to the new folder inside the disk image. Copy this alias to your desktop and then unmount the disk image. Read the rest of this entry »
