How to Password Protect a Folder on a Mac

We love our Macs and here’s one trick that will make you love your Mac more. Do you know that you can password protect a folder on your Mac, there’s no need for a freeware, or third-party application. It’s not built-in to finder but the application is built-in into Macs. It’s called Disk Utility Application. Why in hell do you want to password protect a folder? Lemme guess, you have some Taboo files and you don’t want the kids watching, reading or looking at it. That’s fine, it’s alright to keep a secret.

You might think that the Disk Utility App that came with your Mac is only made to format and repair drives, duplicate and burn CDs and DVDs, and create DMG archives because of its name. Now to password protect a folder, you need to create a DMG using Disk Utility and add encryption to it.

Here’s How:

  1. On Finder press Command+Shut+U to open Disk Utility or you can navigate with finder to Applications/Utilities and Double Click Disk Utility.
  2. While Disk Utility is selected click File/New/Disk Image from Folder or press Shift+Command+N

  3. You will be asked to browse for the folder you want to turn into a disk image
  4. Now you need to choose a filename and where to same the Image file.  Make sure to set Image Format to Compressed and Encryption Type to 128 bit AES Encryption, you can also choose 256bit which is more secure but will make the encryption process slow, ideal for small files. Now hit save.
  5. Upon saving you will be asked for a password, give yourself a favor and memorize it. Your file will be lost forever if you lost your password. Make sure to uncheck “remember password in my keychain”, if you left it checked then your password is automatically applied when you open the Disk Image which makes no sense unless you want it that way.
  6. Just click the newly created DMG file, enter the password and boom there goes your Secret File. Just make sure to eject the disk image if you don’t need it. There are some case where the newly created Disk Image seems not mounted (you can’t see it on your desktop), just eject the Disk Image in Disk Utility and mount it again by double clicking it.

Tip:

You can also set Image format to Read/Write so you can still save files on that Folder but file size is limited.

In order to have a real folder functionality, meaning you can add files of any size you need to follow these steps instead of the later.

Here’s how to create a empty Password Protected Folder or Disk Image

  1. Press Alt+Command+N in Disk Utility
  2. Choose a file name and folder, choose the Image size, select custom so you can set it as much as your hard disk can handle.
  3. Make sure to uncheck “remember in keychain” when asked for a password.

Now you have a Password Protected Disk Image or Folder where you can dump all those secret files. Here’s another Tip, you can also drag the Disk Image to the dock, and set it to start at login so the password protected folder is automatically mounted upon login.

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