Data security today comes first among the tasks facing each user of a personal computer. Indeed, very often you have to protect your own developments, important information, confidential information from the eyes of strangers. Having drawn an analogy with a person’s dwelling, which protects its inhabitants from attacks by strangers, and also protects property from theft, the data stored in a computer can be represented as a kind of bunker (folder) and property stored by it (files). Each house has a door and to provide protection from strangers - a lock unlocked with a cleverly made key. In a personal computer, such a lock is access to the folder with a password, and the key is the password, respectively.
The need to set a password for a folder can arise at any time, so many people are puzzled by the question of how to set a password for a folder. For example, when a new employee arrives at work in an office where several people work, the task may be set to hide data from a young employee that he does not need to know early or even at all. Or, for example, few will be pleased when their photographs from the last "corporate party" in a not too personal form will become the property of the entire department .... At home, it is also quite often necessary to prohibit access to certain information, for example, to children ... Of course, from a professional point of view, it may be necessary to protect data from competitors, intruders, etc. - password protection and encryption - provide all the features for this. How to set a password for a folder?
There are actually several options for answering the question of how to set a password for a folder. Here are some ways to protect information from strangers:
- compression of folders and files in the archive, setting a password protection;
- hiding data and placing it in a secret folder, to which other users access is limited by setting a password;
- Creation of a virtual encrypted disk on which all sensitive materials will be recorded.
In fact, there are many more protection methods and the choice of the most preferable one depends on the specific situation. We will focus on the simplest of them and describe a way to set a password for a folder, as well as how to set a password on a network folder.
It should be noted that standard Windows tools in terms of protecting information contained in folders with a password are quite limited. The only thing that can be done is to restrict the access of certain users to certain folders. In this case, all settings are selected in the “Properties: folder_name” window, invoked using the context menu that opens after right-clicking on a folder and selecting “Properties”. In this window, you must select the "Security" tab and set up user accounts that will have free access to the folder, as well as those to whom access will be locked with a password.
Similarly, the password is set to the network folder. The only difference is that you must first allow access to the folder over the network. This is done on the "Access" tab of the Properties: folder_name window.
The above does not guarantee 100% data protection, but poses a certain barrier against not too experienced curious users. To provide a higher level of protection, you will have to use third-party utilities that are distributed on the network and available for download. For the most part, these programs are easy to use and can be used without much knowledge. To protect information that is not used very often, archiving with setting a password for the archive is the best option.