Go to the App Store on your Mac and search for 'Encrypto'. Luckily, there is a fantastic app called Encrypto (opens in new tab) which does a fine job of password-protecting individual files with AES-256 encryption. While it's to encrypt some files such as PDFs (as we show in the next section), macOS does not offer a general way of encrypting individual files, meaning you will need to rely on a third-party app for most of them. How to encrypt files on Mac using Encrypto Once you know how to successfully encrypt folders, you can then do so with those folders that do contain important information.

It leaves the original folder without encryption or a password so the idea is that you will delete the original in favor of the new disk image.Īlternatively, you can use third party software to encrypt individual files, which we'll cover next. password protect a file with Disk utility Choose the 128-bit AES encryption (recommended) option in Encryption section.

If you don't want to encrypt your Mac's entire startup disk, you can learn how to password protect a folder on Mac instead – an action which also encrypts its content.īe aware, though, that doing this creates a new folder disk image.

Encrypt folder mac