When Apimac announced Protect Files, I figured it would be some really cool way to store your files securely while keeping them accessible. We’ve talked about creating encrypted disk images to store you files, which is a fairly simple way to keep your files under lock and key. What could Apimac, the guys behind Clean Text, have done to improve upon this?
Turns out, not much. Protect Files simply puts a UI layer above disk images, so a newbie will be able to create disk images. The wizard based UI will let you set the amount of space, password, and then let you specify a location to create the image in. Once the image is created, the process is the same as opening a normal disk image. Thankfully, the resulting disk image is a .app file so it doesn’t need Protect Files on another machine to open it.
To those who don’t know what I’m talking about, an encrypted disk image is like a password protected folder. Whenever you open it, you need to provide a password. Once you do that, you can add, edit or delete files as you normally would. Unmounting the disk image locks it up again, and cannot be opened without the password. Save for the government agencies with a ton of horsepower, the files in the disk image are completely secure.
I seriously don’t understand the point of this application, other than maybe making the newbies aware of this method of storing files securely. Actually, even Apimac recommends that this app is mainly geared towards new users who want a more straightforward way of creating encrypted disk images. For an regular user, Disk utility provides more options (including access to the password generator) and being free at the same time.
Protect Files costs $14.95 for a single user license, while the trial version is available for download. I’d highly suggest you instead check out our guide to creating disk images using Disk Utility.
