Protect Your Files: The Easiest and Safest Ways to Protect Your Privacy on Your PC

As different technologies develop more and more quickly , securing your privacy is becoming more and more difficult to achieve. Everyone can Google search your name, and find out about your previous life, your private thoughts from your blog, your interests and hobbies on your MySpace account.

Although the Internet may be filled with information readily available to everyone. You are still able to protect your files on your computer from unwanted access. The aim of this article is to show you how to protect your files, so your files. There will be three methods on how to protect your files, all varying in difficult and severity.Protect your files by hiding folders

This is, by far, the easiest method to protect your files, and is also integrated into the Windows operating system. Most people people already know of this method, if they are familiar with computers. You can right right-click on a folder and tick 'Hidden', and then click apply. This will protect your files from prying eyes, if and only if, the "Do not show hidden files and folders" option is also ticked in 'Folder Options'. It is enabled by default, so if no one has changed it, this method will work just fine.

This is definitely not the best way to protect your files, but it will probably keep your mother from seeing all those naughty pictures of women in your hidden folder.Protect your files with locked archives

The second method is a lot more safer for the purpose protecting your files, and is quite easy as well. The main idea of this method, is to compress your files in password-protected file in order to protect your files from unwanted access. For this task, I would advise using WinZIP, WinRAR or 7ZIP which all come with support for AES 256 bit encryption. This is a very secure form of password encryption. Bear in mind that the compression system that comes with Windows XP and Windows Vista does NOT support AES 256 bit encryption, and is thus susceptible to password cracking. So, to protect your files, you will need to use something with AES 256 bit encryption.

Protecting your files with locked archives is not completely safe either. Your locked archive is only as the password that you are using. Use a password that is at least 12 characters long, and has special characters (%, $, £ etc.) in it. Even long words or sentences are susceptible to dictionary attacks. Keep in mind that a big password-protected archive might raise a few eyebrows in your tech-savvy little brother, so he might begin to wonder what's inside.

Protect your files with TrueCrypt

If you are serious on your endeavor to protect your files, you may want to use TrueCrypt, a very effective way of protecting your file by encrypting them. Unless you are hiding some kind of very valuable data, such as government secrets, you probably won't be needing something as powerful as TrueCrypt to just protect your files from unwanted access. But if you are that interested in it, you can find some pretty good information about it on the Internet, so invest some time into research to protect your files completely!