Is it possible to encrypt single directories?

Is it possible to encrypt a single directory (or a group of directories) of a Mac? Is it possible with third-party software?

kiamlaluno

Posted 2010-08-20T03:22:24.640

Reputation: 1 390

possible duplicate of Mac OS X full-disk encryption, with Time Machine

– Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-08-20T03:57:59.950

I changed the question because I am really interested on encrypting a single directory, rather than creating a new partition, and encrypting it. – kiamlaluno – 2010-08-20T14:13:58.220

Answers

The two solutions below may be of use for you.

http://agilewebsolutions.com/knox

http://www.taoeffect.com/espionage/

JFW

Posted 2010-08-20T03:22:24.640

Reputation: 2 094

Knox is a just a nice front-end to creating and managing encrypted Disk Images as is already easily possible with Disk Utility. I've used it for a while until a bug in its password handling code caused me to lose one of the containers. – Daniel Beck – 2012-08-09T05:41:20.590

another third party solution is truecrypt. I use it with OS X, Ubuntu and Windows.

TrueCrypt is open source.

lexu

Posted 2010-08-20T03:22:24.640

Reputation: 1 822

It looks like you have edited your question so that it now refers to encrypted directories, not volumes. While you cannot encrypt directories directly, as far as I know, you can use encrypted disk images to protect files on your hard drive without encrypting the entire drive.

Martey

Posted 2010-08-20T03:22:24.640

Reputation: 760

I apologize for the change. I was taking the assumption it was not possible to encrypt single directories; when I saw the reply about File Vault, I remembered what I was first trying to do, and I changed the question. – kiamlaluno – 2010-08-20T14:18:09.630

You can also stick stuff in encrypted disk images, and then symlink it to a place outside the disk image! It'll show as a broken alias until you mount the disk image. (A symlink is effectively an alias that works with command-line programs; if you don't care about that, you can probably just use an alias.) – SilverWolf - Reinstate Monica – 2018-05-15T16:20:50.627

For a third party solution I would recommend PGP whole disk encryption http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/index.html

user46046

Posted 2010-08-20T03:22:24.640

Reputation: 901