Encrypt documents

Encrypt documents
Mac Tip #10/04-July-2001

One day I visited a client and we needed to look up a password. He quickly opened up a text file on his computer and there was the password. And his credit card number, PIN number, bank account information and a whole lot of other things a thief would love to have handed over. Anyone could have opened that file — a casual visitor to the house, a burglar after stealing the computer.

I suggested he handle his confidential information another way. That was long enough ago that I suggested the software called Web Confidential (US$20, if you’re going to buy it, then pick up URL Manager Pro while you’re there — you won’t regret it).

The newer Macs though have been able to encrypt files very easily without any extra software and I’ll tell you how.

WARNING! Try this on a test document. If you lose or forget your password you can’t get your information back.

Let’s say you have a document called MyTest inside a folder called Documents and you want to protect it with a password.

Open the Documents folder and scroll around so you can see MyTest.

Put your mouse on MyTest and hold down both the Control key and the mouse button. From the menu which pops up choose Encrpyt. Now you get the dialog box asking for the password. Type a password with extreme care and then type it again in the second box.

You have to type it twice to make sure you’ve got it right.

[Important note: passwords for most things are case-sensitive. That means that the password ABC987d is different from the password abc987D .]

For the moment don’t tick Add to Keychain. Now click the Encrypt button. After a moment you’ll see that the icon for your file called MyTest has a small key on it.

If you try to double click that file (or open it in some other way) you’ll get a message asking for the password. If you can’t supply exactly the correct password you simply can’t access your document.

Tagged as: encrypt, password, safe, secure

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