Individual Folder locking / password

[bcole]

I still consider myself a mac newbie, having only owned one for a month. I have tried to password a couple of folders on my hard drive, to no avail. I have come to the conclusion that Folder --> get info --> Ownership & Permissions has nothing to do with it. Is it in fact possible to password protect an individual folder? I don't want to have to enable FileVault which I assume slows the whole computer down?

 

[gauchogolfer]

You're right in that Ownership just refers to which user has the right to read/write to files in a certain folder. What you need to do to make a password-protected folder is to use Disk Utility to make an encrypted disk image. Drag the info you want into this image, and select your level of encryption. It's a bit of a hassle, but that's the way I do it when necessary.

 

[cbetta]

A better tactic is to use the tool FreeDMG to make this DMG for you. Works perfect for me. I keep alot of important scans of all my snail mail in it.

 

[bcole]

thanks for the swift responses.

I'm just having a play around with disk utility, its pretty complicated to use having had no experience with it before. I presumed that when the .dmg was executed, and the password input, it would just open the drive.. this isn't the case though is it? I can open the drive through disk utility and place it on my desktop, but the space is, for some reason, capped at 31mb? Can this be increased?

Could this be one of the few oversights by apple? When they pride themselves on ease of use, the lack of an adequate privacy system for folders and documents is somewhat surprising.