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- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister,
and welcome to another weekly tip video.
Well, this week, I'm going to demonstrate
how to create a secure disc image on your Mac.
Now, although your Mac can be secured
by the use of strong passwords or even FileVault.
You may want to add a second layer of security
for specific documents.
You may, for instance,
want the convenience of offline storage,
but feel uneasy uploading sensitive information
into iCloud or Dropbox.
Now, with MacOS, it's possible to create a secure disc image
with 128-bit or 256-bit encryption
protected by a strong password,
and the disc image can be used to store
any sensitive files or information.
So, let's go ahead and create our disc image.
Now, to do that, we need to go into disc utility,
so let me just go ahead, fire up disc utility,
and within disc utility, we need to create our new image.
If I say File, New Image,
and I'm gonna say Blank Image.
We'll give it a name.
Let's say we wanted to put our tax documents into
the secure disc image,
so if we call this Tax Documents.
Now, you can create the disc image anywhere.
I'm gonna put it in my documents folder,
which is currently being synced with iCloud.
I could put it on a Dropbox folder if I wanted to.
I could just put it on another drive or another folder
on my Mac and keep it on my Mac,
but really, the reason for doing this is to create
this password protected area where you can store documents.
Let's give it a name.
I'll call it the same.
The size, 100 megabytes.
You can change the size later if you want.
I'm going to leave it 100 megabytes.
What we're going to do, though, is create a sparse image,
so although we create it with a maximum size
of 100 megabytes, when we first create it,
it won't be that size.
It'll expand up to a maximum of 100 megabytes,
but we'll take a look at that shortly.
The format, well, I'm always going to use it on my Mac,
so it's going to be MacOS Extended, brackets Journaled.
If you're gonna use this on a Windows machine,
you might want to change it to MS-DOS FAT or ExFAT,
but I'm going to leave it as MacOS Extended Journaled.
We've got APFS as well, if you're going to use it
just on High Sierra machines,
but MacOS Extended is the most compatible,
so it'll all work on any Mac.
While we're talking about this,
it won't work on iOS, so although this is gonna go
into iCloud and you will see the disc image within iOS,
you won't be able to open it,
so just bear that in mind as well.
This is a Mac-only tip.
Now, encryption,
128-bit AES recommended,
or if you want it to be really secure, 256-bit.
Let's go ahead with 256-bit.
We need to give it a password,
so I'm gonna go ahead.
I can use this here to suggest a password,
but I'm gonna go ahead and just give it
my own personal password, and we'll say Choose.
Partitions, just a single partition, which is fine.
You can create a CD, so it'll create a CD image,
but a single partition is fine,
and then the image format, right?
This is where we select the Sparse Bundle
or the Sparse Disc Image.
Now, the only difference between these three images is
this one here will actually create
a disc image of 100 megabytes.
These are expanding disc images.
The bundle just means it's made out of lots and lots
of smaller files, whereas the sparse disc image
is just one single file.
I'm gonna go ahead with sparse bundle disc image,
and once we've done that, we can say save.
It's creating my sparse bundle.
I'm gonna say Done.
So, if I pop this down out of the way,
alright, to my documents folder,
if I scroll down,
right, there is my Tax Documents.sparsebundle,
and if I look at the size of this, it's just 18 megabytes,
so it will expand up to a maximum of 100 megabytes,
but currently 18 megabytes.
Let's go ahead and put something into it,
so if I open up the secure image file,
I get prompted for my password.
I can remember the password in my Keychain.
You probably don't want to do that,
because we're adding this extra layer of security,
and so I'm not going to check that box.
We'll say okay,
and then on to devices in the side bar.
There we go, there is my Tax Documents disc image
mounted in the side bar, so let's see.
I'll just pop this test file here to keynote file
these two test files.
Drag those over to my Tax Documents folder,
drop them in.
Okay, I've got 98.5 megabytes available.
Now, that's within my 100 megabytes of my file,
so I can close this down, so I can eject it.
Let me open a new finder window again.
Look at the size.
Let's do a quick Get Info.
So, it's still only 18 megabytes,
so there must have been relatively small files in there.
Let me just open this back up to see.
Scroll down.
There it is, with my two documents in.
Yeah, so that was only 350K,
and this one was only, well, it's a tiny file,
so that's why it's not changed considerably.
But anyway, now I've got the secure area
that I can store all my tax documents in,
and once I eject that from the side bar, it's fully secured.
No one can get into it without knowing the password.
256-bit encryption, so perfectly safe.
So, I could, as I say, allow this to be uploaded to iCloud
and synchronised between my other Macs
and it should be perfectly safe while it's in iCloud.
So, that's how you create a secure disc image file
on your Mac, but again, bear in mind,
it can only be opened on your Mac, not iOS,
and also, you must remember the password.
Because of the strong encryption,
if you forget the password,
basically, you'll be locked out and you won't have access
to any of the files that you've securely stored in there,