Episode 9: Why You Need to Password Protect Files
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In this episode, we are going to talk about 3 ways you can protect your files with a password

Sometimes you don’t want to encrypt your entire hard drive or folder.  Sometimes you just want to encrypt a specific file.  PDF’s, Word, and Excel files are usually the most common types of files that folks like to encrypt.  Password protecting a file means that you can share a file, or put it in a public place, but people can’t access it unless they know the password.  This is perfect for sending confidential information to a coworker, or for selling electronic books.  Even if someone gets a hold of your file, without the password, they will not be able to see the contents of the book.

A good reason to password protect your files is if you use public document sharing sites like dropbox or google drive.  As you may know, Google Docs doesn’t offer password protection on their files.  So, people can create a Word document, password protect that file, and then upload it to the cloud.  Now, it’s much safer and only the intended audience can view the contents of the file.

If you are password protecting a Microsoft Office file, the steps are super simple to add this extra layer of security.  First, go to  File -> Info -> Protect Document -> Encrypt with Password.

Next, type a password and confirm the password by typing it again.  Finally, save the file and confirm the password took effect by trying to open the file.

Like all the topics I’ve been writing about here, not everything is ever 100% secure.  This is just adding layers of security to your files.  Other ways of protecting your files is to encrypt your email, send via an encrypted USB, use encrypted cloud providers like Box.

In addition, sometimes you may want to encrypt a bunch of files all together. In that case, you can put all your files in a zip file and then password protect that.  This isn’t as easy or straight forward as with Microsoft Word, but the same theory applies.  The biggest difference is that you’ll need to install special software on your computer that allows you to zip and password protect your file.  Some are free, others are paid.  I personally recommend using 7-zip as I’ve been using it for years.

Another great benefit of using a zip file is that you can basically encrypt any type of file. You are no longer bound by just MS Office or PDF’s.  You can encrypt music, movies, and even malicious data such as viruses or spyware.

That about wraps it up for this week's episode.  Let me know if you enjoyed this episode by reaching out to me on Twitter at apetechda.  I’d love to hear from you!  Stay tuned for next week’s episode where we take a look at 3 different password managers and answer your top questions about their use and effectiveness.

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