Hide Folders is an innovative software application which enables you to password protect all the private information on your hard drive. You can swiftly make your files and folders inaccessible, invisible or protect them from modification or removal. The protected folders or files are not accessible by users - no matter how they are trying to get in - locally or from the net. Effective protection mechanism, intuitive user interface, and set of fine-tuning options will suit the needs of everyone from novice Windows users to computer experts. Since 2001, our Hide Folder software products help our users to hide private files and folders from prying eyes.
Features and benefits
- Immediate data protection (protect and unprotect commands are execited in no time).
- 4 protection methods available: Hide, Lock, Hide & Lock, Read Only
- NTFS, FAT32, exFAT and FAT volumes are supported.
- File masks (wildcards) support.
- Unlimited number of folders can be protected at the same time.
- No limits on the size of protected data.
- Trusted processes support - processes which are permitted to access the protected data.
- No file system structure modifications will occur.
- Password protection to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your private data.
- Protected uniinstall.
- Removing Hide Folders application folder from the system will not uncover hidden folders.
- Files from hidden folders will not be lost even if someone tries to remove an upper-level folder.
- Different wipe tracks options.
- Crutical folders aware - Hide Folders prevent locking system folders for stability reasons.
- Safe mode support - The folders can be hidden even if your computer is running in safe mode.
- Hot keys to manage basic Hide Folders functions.
- Command line support of all main Hide Folders functions.
- Support of folders named with national language symbols .
- Multilingual support, its user interface supports different languages and can be easily translated to new languages.
- Intuitive and extremely easy-to-use user interface with skins.
Difference from internal Windows data protection features
A lot of advanced users believe that our hide folder software (as well as any other third party folder protection software) is useless because Windows has integrated file and folder lock features.
Well, indeed, you can lock folders with Windows and this folder will be inaccessible by the other (unauthorized) users. But there are some annoying limitations that you should be aware of:
- Windows allows you to lock files and folders on NTFS volumes only. FAT volumes are not supported.
- It is impossible to hide folder or file with standard Windows facilities. Only file and folder lock is possible.
- There is no way to make folder invisible but accessible which is helpful for different security tasks like logging, private data recording, backing up etc.
- A system administrator can easily get access to the locked folders and files.
- Some Windows home editions don't have user interface to protect files and folders.
- Windows does not allow setting password for protected data. It authenticates users at logon. So if you share your account with the nother users, then you can't exploit Windows folder protection features.
- It takes some time and user qualification to manage access control in Windows.
Protection modes: Hide folder, Lock folder, Hide & Lock folder, Read Only
Hide — When you enable protection, the protected file or folder will not be visible to a user, but it will be possible to access it if you know the path to the object. This may be helpful when you want to hide application folders but allow to run the applications from these folders. E.g. you may hide Hide Folders application folder so nobody will know about it, but if you type from the command prompt "C:\Program Files\Hide Folders 2012\hf.exe", Hide Folders 2012 will run.
Lock — the protected file or folder will be visible but not accessible. It is similar to built-in protection of Windows NT-based operating systems on NTFS volumes. You can not use this protection method for critical folders, like Windows, Windows\System32, C:\, Hide Folders application folder...
Hide & Lock — The protected file or folder will not be visible to a user and it will not be possible to access them. This protection mode unites Hide and Lock.
Read only — You can access the protected files and folders, but you cannot modify them. If you protect folder contents (using asterisk wildcard), you cannot copy files into the folder.
No protection — If you choose this method, your file or folder will remain unprotected. This method is recommended when you need to unprotect one folder temporarily. If you want to unprotect a folder forever, just remove it from the list.
Trusted processes
You may want some "trusted" applications to have access to the protected data. This may be helpful for antivirus and backup software. Hide Folder lets you set a list of trusted processes that have an unlimited access to the protected files and folders.
Always innovative
Every version of Hide Folders software works better then the previous one. The first version of Hide Folders was released back in the beginning of 2001 and we permanently adding new features and made it more safe and reliable all this time.
