By Be it for protecting personal documents or company secrets, once in a while one simply needs to either hide or restrict access to several files or folders. Fortunately, Windows 7 allows for the encryption process to be done in only a couple of steps, as following:
1. First, find the file / folder you need to protect from others’ sight. In this case, we used a simple text file titled “file to be encrypted”, containing the words “hidden text”.
2. Right-click the desired file / folder and select Properties.
3. In the last section, Attributes, click on Advanced.
4. Tick the “Encrypt contents to secure data”. If it is already ticked, it means the file / folder was previously encrypted.
5. Click OK in the Advanced Attributes window and then again in the file / folder properties window. By this point, the file / folder you selected should be encrypted and safe from strangers’ eyes.
6. For the sake of testing we shall use another user on the same computer to attempt opening the encrypted file and observe the result. Should you want to do the same, log off or simply switch user from the Start menu.
7. On opening the folder where the file is located (in this case, the root of the C:\ partition), you might notice the name of the file is coloured differently.
8. When attempting to open the text file, using a user different than the one to have created it, we get the following error message which puts our quest to an end, proving the file is truly safe.
Disclaimer: FinestDaily does not hold responsibility for any damage to your computer or loss of information resulted from attempting any of the above and you should only try this at your own risk after ensuring you have made at least one secure back-up of the files / folder in question.