What is Files And Folders encryption?
Is a form of disk encryption where individual files or directories are encrypted by the file system itself. This is in contrast to the full disk encryption where the entire partition or disk, in which the file system resides, is encrypted. Unlike cryptographic file systems or full disk encryption, general-purpose file systems that include filesystem-level encryption do not typically encrypt file system metadata, such as the directory structure, file names, sizes or modification timestamps. This can be problematic if the metadata itself needs to be kept confidential. In other words, if files are stored with identifying file names, anyone who has access to the physical disk can know which documents are stored on the disk, although not the contents of the documents.
How this helps us in real life?
Imagine you have a laptop and you don’t want its performance to be affected by encryption (because encrypting the disk slows down reading and writing), but you also want the files that are important to you to be protected from theft. Here comes the key encryption of files in Windows.
But how does this actually protect us?
First, let’s clarify that encrypted files can be opened by the installed Windows itself if someone steals your laptop and opens it. For this, the first basic thing is to protect your computer windows login – the user must have a login password! The system administrative account must be disabled or with a password.
Now, if someone steals your laptop, it can’t go into Windows, and if he removes the drive and tries to mount it as a USB drive, all the files you’ve encrypted will NOT be open.
We have prepared for your attention two video tutorials that describe “How to encrypt your files in Windows” and “How to decrypt your files in Windows”.
Watch video tutorial on “How to encrypt your files in Windows” in YouTube
Watch video tutorial on “How to decrypt your files in Windows” in YouTube
In conclusion, we would say that in the 21st century, information security is extremely important and one must emphasize it.