Keep personal data under lock & key
Want to keep prying eyes off your data? Will Stapley reveals the most effective ways to disguise and encrypt info saved on your PC
Quick and easy
It’s not particularly secure, but renaming a file is a quick way of hiding it. You can do this by highlighting the file, rightclicking and selecting Rename (or use the F2 keyboard shortcut), then giving your file a new name. Change the file extension too (for example, renaming finances.doc to photos.zip), and its icon will also change, further cloaking the file’s identify. Do this on more than one file and you’ll soon forget what’s what, but it’s a good way to hide a single file from someone else who uses your PC. SECURITY RATING ★★★
Hide your folders
Windows hides lots of files from you (such as system files that would prevent Windows from running if deleted). You can use this approach to hide your own files. Right-click a file or folder you want to hide, select Properties, then tick the Hidden box (see screenshot above far right). Be warned that it’s not hard for someone to uncover hidden files (open File Explorer, select View and tick ‘Hidden items’ to reveal them), but it’s a quick way to stop casual snoopers. SECURITY RATING ★★★
Hide entire drives
Similar to hiding files and folders, you can also tuck an entire drive under the carpet. Open File Explorer, right-click This PC, then select Manage. In the Computer Management window that appears, select Storage, Disk Management from the list on the left.
You’ll now see a complete list of all your hard drives and their partitions. Right-click the one you want to hide, then click ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths…’. You’ll see the drive letter currently assigned to the drive or partition. To hide it, click Remove (see screenshot above). This means the drive or partition won’t appear in File Explorer or be accessible to other programs on your PC (such as a word processor). To restore the drive, repeat the process above but select Add instead of Remove, then select a drive letter when prompted. SECURITY RATING ★★★
Hide files in a photo
If you’re feeling particularly sneaky, you can hide a file within an image, such as a JPG or PNG file.
First, add the files you want to hide in a ZIP file by selecting them, then rightclicking and choosing ‘Send to’, ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’. Next, open File Explorer and move the ZIP file into the same folder as the photo you want to hide it in. In the address bar of File Explorer, type cmd and press Enter – this opens the folder in Command Prompt.
Now, the clever part: type copy /b [image file]+[zip file] [output file], replacing the text in square brackets with
your filenames. For example, our image is dog.jpg, the ZIP hide.zip and we want the resulting file to be called dog2.jpg, so we type copy /b dog.jpg+hide.zip dog2.jpg (see screenshot below). The new file, dog2.jpg, looks and behaves just like a normal image file.
To reveal its hidden contents, we need to use a separate archive tool called WINRAR (free from www.snipca. com/32605).
Once you’ve installed WINRAR, change the file extension of the image file to ‘rar’ (in our example, we changed it to dog2.rar). Next, double-click it to open it in WINRAR and you’ll see the contents of the hidden ZIP file. SECURITY RATING ★★★
Create encrypted archives
WINRAR also includes a tool to create password-protected archived files. Select the files you want to protect (hold Ctrl while clicking them in File Explorer), then right-click one and select ‘Add to archive…’ (this option has the WINRAR icon next to it). Click ‘Set password’ at the bottom (see screenshot right), enter a secure password, then click OK. Next, click OK once more to create the archive. To open the archive, double-click it, then enter your password when prompted. Once you’ve got access to the archive, you can copy files to your desktop (or another location), or add new ones to the archive using drag and drop. SECURITY RATING ★★★
Create a personal vault
Encrypted archives are secure, but constantly removing and adding files to them can be frustrating. If you want quick access to protected files, it’s better to create a personal vault using Veracrypt (download the ‘Windows Installer’ version from www.snipca.com/32604). Don’t be put off by Veracrypt’s vast array of settings – you can leave most of them at their defaults.
The most important part is to choose a secure password and not forget it – there’s no way to recover files from a Veracrypt vault if you don’t have the password. See our Mini Workshop above for full instructions. SECURITY RATING ★★★