How to hide and password-protect your files in Mac OS X with encrypted volumes

Do you have financial data, secret emails, or other sensitive files that you want to hide from people? If you have a Mac running OS X Leopard, you can easily secure your files away in a password-protected encrypted volume. If your computer is ever stolen or hacked, the intruder would need a supercomputer to break into your files.

These instructions are for OS X Leopard (10.5) but the instructions are almost identical for OS X Tiger (10.4).

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A Mac running OS X.

1. Open a Finder folder and launch the Disk Utility (by double-clicking its icon), which is located in: Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities

2. At the top of the Disk Uitility window, click on the "New Image" icon.

3. Provide a name for your encrypted volume in the "Save As" field. I like to call mine "whatever.sparsebundle" (substitute your desired name for "whatever"). It will be clear why I like to add the .sparsebundle to my filename later on, in step 10.

4. Specify a location in the "Where" field that will contain your encrypted volume (Desktop is fine).

5. Provide a volume name (in the "Volume Name" field).

6. Specify a volume size from the drop-down menu. My encrypted volume is 8.0 GB (the last option on the drop-down menu) so that I won't run out of space too soon. The bigger your volume, the more files you can store - especially important for big files like photos and videos.

7. Specify a volume format from the drop-down menu. It's fine to leave it as the default, "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".

8. Select the last option from the "Encryption" drop-down menu, "256-bit AES encryption (more secure, but slower)".

9. Leave the default option in place in the "Partitions" menu, "Single partition - Apple Partition Map".

10. From the "Image Format" drop-down menu, select the last option, "sparse bundle disk image" and then clicke the "Create" button.

11. In the window that appears, enter a strong password, enter the same password in the "Verify" field, UNCHECK the "Remember password in my keychain" box, and click "OK". Wait a few seconds for your Mac to finish creating the encrypted volume, the close the Disk Utility window.

12. On your Desktop you should see a new disk image named "Disk Image" (you can rename it if you want). This is the image of your encrypted volume. Double click it and move any files you want to hide and password-protect into this new disk image.

13. Right click (or control-click with a trackpad or 1-button mouse) the new disk image icon on your desktop and select the second option (Eject "Disk Image").

14. That's it, you're done! You have now hidden and password-protected your sensitive files. To access them again, you have to mount the encrypted volume image. Navigate to the folder that contains your sparse bundle image (you specified that location in step 3), double click the encrypted volume icon, enter your password, and the disk image will appear on your desktop, ready for you to view, edit, or add files to your secret stash.

Tips & Warnings

• Use a strong password! Include capital and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, and don't use words that can be found easily online or in a dictionary!
• Don't forget your password! If you do, you'll have to delete the encrypted volume and you'll lose your secret files!

Resources

• How to make your Mac OS X Leopard computer secure - the basics

[pymolguy]

on 8/25/2009 tx i just tried it works great.