How to Protect a Mac File or Folder

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jason, previous MAC genius and today I'm going to show you how to protect a folder and/or file. What we're going to do to do this is I've created a test document here and I'm going to make a duplicate of this O3O2.jpeg. I'm going to click on it and drag it, and as I drag it I'm going to hold down the option key which makes a copy of it. It's going to label that copy so we know that's the copy I'm going to take in there. And I'm going to close this folder and I'm going to highlight the folder once and bring up my contextual menu which is right clicking or control clicking, on get info, and you can see there's a little locked box right there, we can just check that. And that pretty much takes care of our problem, that will keep us from trying to throw this away. You'll see this operation cannot be completed because the item test is locked. So, that's a quick way to lock folders if you want to keep - if you have children that are on the computer and you want to keep stuff from getting thrown away, you can also do that. And I'm going to go ahead and on this document in here and do the same thing, get info, and to lock this as well. You can do this, the folder does not, or I'm sorry, the file does not have to be inside this folder for it to lock. You can lock a folder separately from a file. So I'm going to get info and I'm going to lock this, and that will also keep your file from being thrown away as well. And obviously to do that all you got to do is turn the lock off. And that is the basic way to do it. The more expensive way is you can change ownership and permissions if you're the administrator, you can kind of set and read access which means people can only access it for information and look at it, and reading and writing. You can set different - more expanded privileges on that which I'm sure will be covered later. So that's how you protect a file or a folder. I'm Jason, previous MAC genius, and I'll talk to you soon."