Pencil Shavings

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

How to password protect your files on a Mac

I have a secret. I keep a document of my online identities and passwords. It is a pretty vulnerable document to have hanging around in my hard drive, but I just can't trust my brain to do the work. So I type them into my document in cryptic short-hand, but once in a while I worry that it is not cryptic enough.

The next best alternative is to password protect your file, or to be precise, a folder containing your sensitive documents. You can do this by creating a disk image in disk utility.

1. Open Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility)
2. Create a new disk image from folder (File>New>Disk image from folder)
3. Choose the folder you want to encrypt.
4. Select AES-128 from the Encryption pop-up menu in the Save dialog box. Save.

(Source: I like the way Ted Landau writes. I think I'll check out his books Mac OS X Help Line, Tiger Edition and Mac 0S X disaster relief. )

No comments: