Whether you spent months creating this complicated PSD file or writing thousands of lines of PHP code, there is likely a common thing that you don’t want to occur on your precious files – having them copied by someone else without your approval. If your computer’s security settings aren’t in check, someone in the same network as you may copy your important personal or business files right under your nose. Worse situations might occur if you are logged into a public Wi-Fi hotspot and have your files stored in unprotected areas. Taking some extra steps to protect these files is crucial and fortunately, there are a few easy ways in doing so.
Keep Them in the Cloud
A simple upload to your favorite cloud hosting service like Dropbox or Google Drive is a quick way to prevent your files from being accessed by other people. The only remaining steps you have to do is to make sure you do not place these files in a public or shared folder and use a strong account password to make sure prospective intruders will fail at any brute force attempts. Once finished, you will have the convenience of accessing these secure files from any computer or mobile device.
For the vast majority of cloud services, safeguarding your files using this method has its disadvantages though. First, you have to abide by the provider’s ToS as indirectly violating it could result in account termination. Those that are very paranoid on privacy may want to avoid cloud services too as even the biggest companies tend to access files that may appear as suspicious. Finally, servers can be subjected to downtime so there are possibly rare moments where you won’t be able to retrieve your files.
Place Them in Secure Archives
An effective and full offline solution would be to create a ZIP, RAR or 7z file, add some files you want to protect and add a password. This not only secures one or more files and folders but it also reduces the file size depending on your compression method and file format. But if you prioritize compression on a robust format like 7z, be prepared to wait long before you can access the files unless your system has an extremely fast processor. Once created, you can toss them into a flash drive or external drive knowing that the file is secure even if you lose the storage device. This is also a good method for cloud uploads since it will be impossible even for the provider to open the encrypted file. Again, you have to use a very lengthy and complicated password to discourage brute force password recovery methods. 7-Zip is a great program to use and is available for both Mac and Linux.