Can I put a password on a folder ???

You can do something similar to password protecting it using Windows security features. It depends, though, on using the computer the "right" way. On top of that, I actually don't really recommend it. If you have something that you want to password protect and keep secure, I recommend a slightly different approach.

Windows allows you to place restrictions on who can do what with a folder, or even a file. In Windows Explorer, right click on a folder and Properties, and then click on the Sharing tab:

Here you can see the properties of a folder on my machine called "Airpollution_files".

Here you can control who has access to that folder. The default way my machine is set up, make this folder private. I can remove that and further restrict on an account-by-account basis which users can access that folder, and whether they can modify, read or even see the folder contents. It's actually very powerful.

However, it's based on Windows user accounts. Thus if you give your own account full access to the file, as I assume you would, then anyone that can login to the machine as you can immediately access the file. There's no real password on the folder, it's your ability to login to Windows using your login password that controls your access to the file.

And since it's based on Windows user account it assumes you're actually using different user account for different people.

The approach I prefer, and in fact use myself, is to use the free open-source tool True Crypt.

Once you "mount" that file using TrueCrypt, and supply the correct password or pass-phrase to unlock it, the contents of that file appear as another drive on your system.

TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).


Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on the fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on the fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM.