In practice, this isn’t a problem for individual files such as a couple of private photos or PDFs you don’t want to show in the Finder, but when you start adding large folders that weigh hundreds of MBs or GBs to the app, you’ll end up with less available space on your Mac (due to the copying process) and slowdowns caused by encryption. My only problem with Hider is that it doesn’t encrypt and hide files while keeping them in their original locations all the time – under the hood, it copies them to its secure vault. Hider 2 supports external drives (a feature that I haven’t been able to test personally), and, overall, it has good integration with OS X to add, find, and show files in a variety of ways. The app installs a system service to hide files with a right-click from the Finder’s contextual menu, and, if you don’t want to open the full Hider app every time you need to access a protected file, there’s a menubar agent that you can keep running while the app is closed to unhide and search individual files from there (alas, it doesn’t support secure notes).
Drag & drop allows you to quickly grab files and folders from the Finder and hide them, and if you’re using tags on Mavericks, you can even tag files inside Hider with drag & drop without leaving the app. There’s no denying that Hider’s simplicity makes the process of hiding and encrypting files pleasantly easy. Hidden files have a muted toggle click it, and the toggle will activate, revealing the file/folder again in its original location in the Finder. Hider’s peculiarity is that it combines encryption with changes to file visibility: when you add a file or folder to Hider, it is both encrypted and hidden from the regular Finder, stored securely in the Hider vault elsewhere on your Mac. In the main screen, Hider 2 shows your local vault, Mavericks tags (if any) and secure notes in a sidebar, allowing you to organize these sections in sub-groups to add files to Hider, you simply drag & drop them from the Finder onto the app’s window. Hider 2 does a lot of work to make encryption and file visibility uncomplicated matters for average Mac user who may not necessarily know what encryption is but can understand the idea of “protecting files”. From a visual standpoint, Hider 2 looks nice with its dark background and UI elements, which is a welcome complement to the app’s otherwise boring technical premise. MacPaw is using AES–256 encryption, and upon first launch the app will ask you to create a new vault password (a process similar to 1Password 4) in a screen that has a nice lock/unlock animation. Hider 2 works by creating a password-protected vault where files and text notes will be encrypted and stored. For the past week, I’ve been trying MacPaw’s Hider 2, a new app that wants to unify and streamline the process of hiding and encrypting files in a single, intuitive interface. I try not to be too paranoid about the security of files I keep on my Mac, but I do enjoy the peace of mind provided by encrypting some work documents when necessary, hoping that there will be an extra layer of security for those files in case of disaster or device loss.
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