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Posted by Steven L Umbach on November 1, 2005, 1:15 pm
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password protect folders. If you are using an operating system that uses
ntfs file system such as Windows 2000 or XP you can use ntfs permissions to
allow only authorized user accounts to access the folder within the
operating system but there are some problems even with that. Any user that
is a local administrator can access files he does not have permissions to
and it is trivial to become an administrator on a computer that is not
physically secured. Also someone who wanted access to your files could
simply remove the hard drive and put it into another computer to read/copy
them or boot from a cdrom such as Bart's PE. If the files were encrypted
then they could be possibly be denied access to the data.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308418 --- file
permissions in XP.
So depending on how confidential that data is you may want to store it on
another computer that is locked up somewhere securely or at minimum encrypt
the data. Encryption has it's own hazards and many encryption programs use a
password as the key to encrypt the data. A malicious user could install a
keyboard logger on your computer to capture your password to access you
encrypted file. Windows XP Pro has a very secure implementation of file
encryption called EFS. Your logon password is used to protect access to your
EFS private key that is needed to decrypt your files. IF you export and
delete your certificate/private key from the computer then your EFS
encrypted files would not be available to someone even if they knew your
password. Of course repeated importing and then deleting your EFS private
key to work with your data is tedious and easy to forget to delete the
private key after each work session or the end of the work day. If you
consider EFS or any encryption PLEASE be very careful as it is easy for you
to lose permanent access to your data and best practice would be to have
your EFS certificate/private key backed up to a password protected .pfx file
to external media in a couple safe places and to also backup your encrypted
work as clear text to external media and stored securely. --- Steve
>I own a restaurant and keep all my financial information in one folder and
> have managers that have access to the computer. Is there a way I can
> password protect a folder?
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