XP Pro: How to Prevent Others from Accessing Your Files

Contributor Icon Contributed by MickeyMouse Date Icon September 6, 2005  
Tag Icon Tagged: Windows

This tutorial describes how to use Windows XP Pro’s Encrypting File System (EFS) feature to prevent other users from reading our files.


So we all have a few files on our system that we don’t want anybody else to be able to access. Luckily, XP Pro has an encryption service to be able to keep this files out of public view.

    1. Right-click the file that you want to encrypt
    2. Click Properties
    3. Select the General tab
    4. Click Advanced
    5. Under Compress or Encrypt attributes pick Encrypt contents to secure data check box
    6. Click OK
    7. If the file is located in an unencrypted folder, you receive an dialog box giving you an option to encrypt the entire folder that contains the file.
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    however!!! NOTE!! if you do the above and then somehow lose your main harddrive that windows is on, you WILL LOSE DATA since the encryption key is UNIQUE to your system.

    Recommendation: BACKUP Your Encrypted Certificates or else you will not be able to ever open those files if you redo your windows setup or lose your windows harddrive...

    i know from experience, thank god i did a backup of the folders prior to encrypting them...


    peace
 
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