Hey everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another quick tech-torial for you
this time on how to encrypt a bunch of documents that you want to
send to somebody by email; and I've done a video on this before
where sending a individual document like a PDF
and you want to encrypt that one file, and there's features available for
that in other software now. This is having a series of documents that you
would go through a zip utility to compress the files
which even though you may not need to compress them
that's the process of giving us the prompt to then
put a password on it. So it doesn't matter what kind of documents you're
sending, or what format they're in you just have
them all in a folder like we've got here, in this confidential folder,
and we've got a bunch of documents here that we want to encrypt.
So the first thing you want to do is go to 7-zip.org
You have a few options right at the top of the screen here
the most recent stable version is at the top
where you've got the option of a 32-bit or 64-bit
I would recommend downloading the 64-bit unless you
already have a 32-bit Windows for some reason, which you shouldn't but
if you are using that then this would be the one to get
otherwise go with the 64. If you want to go with the latest version for some
other features that might be available, you can do that but this is a non-stable
version which is why it says Alpha here after the version number.
To download it you can just click the file
save first and then run. Depending on what browser you're using if it's Google
Chrome or Firefox it'll show up at the top of your screen
or at the bottom, but once you download it
you should already know how to download files that's a whole other video we
going to make for you if you don't know how to download things
but you would run it. This is where it's going to default to the destination
directory. So you just run the install and it's
going to want you to restart your computer.
once you restart the computer, you're now able to compress the files.
and it is so simple. As simple as right clicking on that folder,
going up to 7-zip and within here you've got a few options
but you want to choose the first one to
add to archive. If you select any option other than that
it's not going to prompt you for a password
it's just simply going to compress the set of files
and create that zip folder or 7z folder. So we'll go to add archive.
You can change the name if you want
and the format here, I believe defaults to 7z
for the format, but if you want to make sure
that they can open it in other software you can choose
or choose zip instead of the default or any of the others
which would force them to have to download other software
but you'll see in a minute you might need the other software anyway.
So aside from the name in the archive format
you're going to want to put in a password
and you definitely do not want to put a password that is that weak
because as strong as the encryption algorithms could be
all someone needs to get into this is the password
and if they just assume based on your name
or because you were emailing them the password or something like that
they would have the password and get into it and have access to everything
so make sure it's a strong password, do not email the password
to them. But you could text it to them or just simply
call them with it. I'm just going to keep it simple
just so that we can see how this works. So we've got the name,
archive format, a password, now this is showing us the password because no
one's looking over our shoulder as we do this
otherwise you could have that turned off and you'll have to enter it twice to
make sure you have it right. The encryption method is important to know.
The default encryption method is zip crypto
and that would allow you to have a basic level encryption at least
that would be compatible with almost any zip program. Especially if you're
choosing the zip archive format, then they'll be able to
open it with their built-in windows zip utility
AES-256 is a much stronger algorithm for encrypting files.
So this would be recommended for a more secure password
or more secure encryption, the password is up to you
how strong you're going to make that, but with this encryption they would not be
able to open the file using their built-in program even though
you chose the archive format as zip. I've tried this already multiple
times it only comes up with error messages
So if you're sending it to somebody that is not capable of figuring out how to
download 7-zip and get that installed to unzip the files
and they're... you you don't want to deal
with that incompetence, then you can simply leave the encryption
method as zip crypto and it'll work for them much easier.
But if it's sensitive information and you have to get it to them,
and you need to make sure it's encrypted
at the strongest level possible, then they're gonna have to just learn
how to download install software. So I would recommend going with the AES-256
and make sure you got a strong password.
So hit OK, it creates a file with the extension that you told it
whether it's 7z or zip. So in this case we've got the
zip format and if I was to try and extract all from here
I'm getting error messages and it's not a very helpful message
but this is what happens because we had this with the AES-256
encryption. So we're not able to use the
built-in zip utility that comes with windows
you need to have 7-zip installed and then you can say
to extract the files. I've already got the
folder because it's on my computer so it wouldn't make sense to be
unzipping it to the same folder. The person you're
sending it to would not have this kind of a prompt
because the folder wouldn't exist yet. So I'm just going to tell it to auto rename
and, now we're prompted to put in our password.
So now if I look at the folder it unzip to
there's the copies of the files that it's now unzipped.
That's basically it. That's how you can encrypt your files
and send them to anybody, making sure that your confidential
information stays confidential. But remember to make sure that it's only
as safe as how strong of a password you create.
Alright! That's it for this tech-torial. Thanks so much for watching.
If you found it helpful give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already
We'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.