My Lockbox 5.0

Stops unauthorized people from accessing your work files or other sensitive folders by protecting them with a master password. Prevents users from accidentally locking crucial system folders.

If in search of a simple and free software solution to protect and hide all your sensitive data from prying eyes, My Lockbox offers you one of the easiest protection tools available to lock your folders. With just one click from your context menu, you can protect a folder and all its subfolders from any local or remote user wanting to access your data.

Its password-based protection method guarantees that nobody but you can access your private data. To help you remember it in case you forget, you will be asked to provide a hint and an e-mail address, which the program’s password recovery system will use to verify your identity. You’ll be asked to pick one folder to lock during the installation process – once the installation has completed, that folder will be locked by default using your password as a key. This free tool will lock only that one folder, but as there is no limit in the number of subfolders that you can add to it, you can use it with as many folders as needed, as long as you put them all inside the protected “master folder”.

You can change the selected folder using the “Set folder” button of the program’s interface, which also has “Lock” and “Unlock” buttons to change the status of the folder with just one click. Alternatively, you can add My Lockbox to your context menu and use it anytime you need without having to open the program’s main window. You will also find there some advanced options to lock your folder automatically after a set number of minutes, to manage your notifications, hotkeys, password, and updates, as well as to set a list of trusted software products. These will be given access to your protected folder and subfolders to, for instance, back them up. The program has been designed to prevent Windows system folders from being locked using this tool, as it would render your operating system unusable.

If you would like to protect more than one folder (actually, any number of folders), you can use the tab provided here to upgrade to the Pro edition, which, other than removing that one-folder limitation, offers you the same features already available in its free companion. When compared to some of its competitors, My Lockbox’s functionality may lack the flexibility that is commonly available in similar tools but remember that this one is free and that it does work. If the one-folder-only limitation suits you, this is a serious and simpler alternative to other expensive and complex protection tools.