password protecting individual folders

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dianne
  • Start date Start date
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Dianne

I am a teaching assistant at a university. My computer is
in an open lab to which students have relatively easy
access. I leave my computer on all the time and most of the
stuff is not worth keeping private, but I do have a folder
that contains things like next week's test and private
student information that shouldn't be seen by the students.
I want to require a password to open ONLY the folder
containing the class info. I know I can make a password to
log on, but that's too much trouble for me when I only want
to protect one folder. Is there a way to do this?
 
No, you cannot password protect folders. All security is based on the user
account you use to log on. Depending on the way your computer is setup, you
may have authority to restrict access to that folder by right-clicking on
it, choosing Properties, clicking the Security tab, and removing the account
or group that students use to log on. Without knowing more about your
situation it is hard to say more.
 
If all you want to do is to prevent the students from accessing that
one folder and if you are using NTFS, disable simple file sharing and
edit the permissions to deny the group the students are located in.
Make sure you are not in the same group as the students as this will
affect you too even if you add your username separately. Deny
permissions always override access permissions so this is important to
keep in mind. Other things you can try: compress the folder and put a
password on the compressed folder. This is doable, but I've never
tried it using the built-in utility. With winzip, the function is
there and I've used that.
 
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