Folder Lock enables you to encrypt files and folders on Windows computer using Military Standard 256-bit AES encryption. It encrypts and decrypts your files on-the-fly i.e. the contents of your files are loaded in memory instead of computer hard drive. This guarantees that your data is unrecoverable from the hard drive, and is, therefore, faster than normal encryption & decryption method that decrypts everything in hard drive.
This data and privacy protection software also allows you to create Lockers and keep them on shared folders, network mapped drives, and NAS devices, and you can easily access your encrypted data directly from network locations without the need to copy anything on to your local hard drive.
To encrypt your files, you will need to create a Locker. A Locker is simply an encrypted storage file to store and protect your important files and folders. These Lockers can store any number of files as they are dynamic and resizable; can be added in Backup Online so they can be backed up automatically; and can be moved to portable drives, shared folders, network mapped drive or NAS devices.
Furthermore, since Lockers are undeletable without a correct password (depending on your security settings), you can be rest assured that whatever files you dump into them will remain confidential, theft-proof, and loss-proof.
Step 1. Choose Locker name and password
Select Encrypt Files from the left navigation panel in Folder Lock and then click on the Create Locker button on the top menu.
The Locker creation wizard starts with a request to input your Locker Name and Locker Path. By default, the Locker name (e.g. Locker01) and the Locker path will be provided. Locker path will default to your computer My Documents folder. You may choose to select a different Locker Name as well as the Locker Path.
Step 2. Set file locker password
The next step is to enter your Locker password details. In the Set Locker Password field, enter a password for your Locker. Please note that THIS PASSWORD CANNOT BE RECOVERED. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to make sure that you keep a password that is hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember. This password needs to be at least 6 characters short and up to a maximum of 100 characters. You may use ASCII, Alphanumeric or special characters to set your password.
A password-strength meter will show you the strength of your password and you use the Virtual Keyboard to enter password, without the fear of your password being hacked into by a Keystroke recorder or Keyloggers.
Step 3. Set file locker size
The wizard now gives you data-size ranges that you can select from the drop-down list in the ‘Choose Size’ field. Along with preset size options, you may also click on Custom to set your own Locker size. Then, the wizard will display the size of the Locker-file that will be required to create your Locker, as well as the available disk-space.
Because the Locker size CANNOT be changed in the future, we recommend that you choose the maximum size for your data. You can keep adding more files to your Locker as and when you require.
Please remember to choose a Locker size between 300 MB – 2 TB for the Backup-able Locker, and a Locker size between 20 MB – 14 TB for the Basic Locker.
Backup-able Lockers are actually FAT32 based encrypted virtual drives that can be added to Secure Backup. And hence, a single file larger than 4 GB in size CANNOT be placed in the Locker and the maximum size of a Backup-able Locker is 2 TB.
Basic Lockers, on the other hand, do not carry size-based restrictions as they are NTFS. However, they CANNOT be backed up using Folder Lock’s Secure Backup service. The maximum size of a Basic Locker is 14 TB.
Step 4. Create file locker
Here, the actual Locker creation process starts, and the wizard displays a progress bar that will show until the Locker creation process is completed. And then the wizard will display the Locker Name, Locker Path, Locker Size, and the Locker Type information for your new Locker.
Folder Lock alternative
You can use Encrypto, a free alternative to Folder Lock, to lock private files and documents with password on computer. It is fast, free and available for both Windows and Mac users. Like Folder Lock, Encrypto also lets you protect files with AES-256 encryption.