Wishlist - Password Protect And/Or Encrypt Project Files

[Dan Stone 0]

I did a search, but didn't find this as being requested before.

 

Since our ancestry files can hold lots of personal information, I'd like to see an option to password protect (at a minimum) and/or encrypt (preferred) project files. I would hope that my computer and/or backup drives are never stolen/compromised, but should they be, I'd like to know that it would be difficult to access the personal information contained in my ancestry records. Yes, options exist to encrypt the whole drive, but it's nice to also have the extra option for added peace of mind to protect the specific files. I would hope that this might be something fairly easy to implement in TMG as well.

[Robert Jacobs 0]

I did a search, but didn't find this as being requested before.

 

Since our ancestry files can hold lots of personal information, I'd like to see an option to password protect (at a minimum) and/or encrypt (preferred) project files. I would hope that my computer and/or backup drives are never stolen/compromised, but should they be, I'd like to know that it would be difficult to access the personal information contained in my ancestry records. Yes, options exist to encrypt the whole drive, but it's nice to also have the extra option for added peace of mind to protect the specific files. I would hope that this might be something fairly easy to implement in TMG as well.

 

If you are running under XP or Vista you can use the Windows Encryypting File System to encrypt particular directories or files. It's a much more serious encryption than, say, that which Word or Quicken offers. It's transparent to the logged-on user (which means that you need to protect your log-on credentials pretty carefully) so that once you have the system set up there's little pain or fuss in performing your normal operations. If you carry a laptop with a TPM chip you can use Bitlocker as well which will provide complete security unless the government wants to find out about your Aunt Alice.

 

formerprof

[Dan Stone 0]

Good information. Thank you.

 

If you are running under XP or Vista you can use the Windows Encryypting File System to encrypt particular directories or files. It's a much more serious encryption than, say, that which Word or Quicken offers. It's transparent to the logged-on user (which means that you need to protect your log-on credentials pretty carefully) so that once you have the system set up there's little pain or fuss in performing your normal operations. If you carry a laptop with a TPM chip you can use Bitlocker as well which will provide complete security unless the government wants to find out about your Aunt Alice.

 

formerprof

[Jim Byram 0]

This request recently came up from a law firm that is apparently using TMG for a case. And the answer was essentially the same to them... take advantage of the features already built into the operating system.

 

It would be simple to password projects from within TMG and would accomplish exactly nothing since the data tables could be deciphered directly although you couldn't make sense of the data without considerable effort.

 

I couldn't see encrypting the data tables unless such functions are directly built into Visual FoxPro. I don't know if that's the case or not. However, even if VFP has such functions, I can't see the development effort and overhead justified by the rare need of TMG users to do such a thing.