There have always been some files that are private. But how we want to make it protected to other person? There is one way to keep your files truly confidential… “Encrypt them”. The EFS(Encrypting File System) scrambles the content of file or folder and make it very hard to snoop and read them. So how I want to do the encryption dude…?? Ok, it easy… just few simple steps you need to do…

1st thing you need to know whether the EFS is in your OS system. The EFS is available in Windows Vista Business,

Enterprise and Ultimate; XP Pro, and Window 2000. For XP Home version, it lacks of EFS. Meanwhile for Vista Starter, Home Basics, and Home Premium allow only decryption that mean you only can read the encrypted file but not encrypt it. On the other hand, if you want to use the EFS at your partition, firstly you must make sure that partition is formatted by using the NTFS system.

For some who don’t know how to switch maybe they thinking about, “is it need to format the hard disk?” For your information, you don’t need to do all the formatting, restoring back apps and data from back up… 1st step you need to do is click Start, then go to Run and type cmd.exe and then press Enter. After that, command Prompt Window will pop up. Now type convert followed by a space, the drive letter, a colon, another space, and finally /fs.ntfs For example, enter convert c: /fs.ntfs if you want to convert your C: drive to NTFS. Ah… also need to tell you, encryption requires you use a password protected account. Ok, now we go back to how to do the EFS…

STOW YOUR FILES:

To encrypt you files or folder, right click it then in the General Tab, click Advance button. Then check the Encrypt contents to secure data and click Ok twice. If you are encrypting a folder, then you will be ask if you want to encrypt its files and subfolder as well. After done the encryption, you no need any password of software to save or open it, it looks same like other files and folder, But the different is, others PC on the network and other user account can’t view the file content… but if someone using your password to login to your account then they can access the files…

STREAMLINE THE STEPS:

Well, you can shorten the process by adding the EFS command in your right-click context menu. To do this in your XP, you can simply use Quick Registry Edit. There is 1 software you can do the EFS easier and safer that is Tweak UI, a free PowerToy from Microsoft. After you download, install and run the software. Select Explorer on the left pane, scroll trough the options on the right, and check the Show Encrypt on context menu and the click OK. If you already have Tweak UI on your system, you may need to upgrade to a more recent version. For Window Vista user, Tweak UI is not compatible with it. You will need to use Totalidea free software, TweakVI Basic Utility. I’m not gonna write about it here, you can explore it by yourself…

Sazzuke is an author for Computersoftnewsblog.com Niche News. He write about computer security info and news. To get more extra information about the computer security and privacy you can go to his blog at www.computersoftnewsblog.com and subscribe on it.