Introduction

Information that you record on any medium is liable to be accessed and misused by others. This is all the more critical in the case of data stored on your computer. The security offered by your Windows operating system is minimal. The Windows password can easily be bypassed. Even if you protect your documents by storing them as hidden files they are not safe from anyone wishing to open them. For someone familiar with Windows this is a simple matter. There are also security leaks in Windows that leave your hidden documents open to access. If you have just opened one of your hidden Word files and then closed it after use, someone who does not know the location of the file can still open it from either Word's File Menu or from the Documents tab of your Start Menu. Therefore, if you have data on your computer that you want to keep away from prying eyes you will need something more than Windows can offer you. You require a special program that can protect data properly.

The usual method of protecting data today is to encrypt it. This encryption is protected by a user-defined password. The document that you have encrypted can only be decrypted and made viewable by the program that you used to encrypt it. Anyone wishing to open the encrypted document will therefore have to supply the program with the password that you used to encrypt it. This effectively prevents anyone to whom you have not given the password from opening your protected documents. However, you must not forget that different encryption programs offer different levels of security. The level and depth of encryption will determine how easy or difficult it is for the code used in the encryption to be broken. Therefore the program you choose for encryption of your data will determine whether you have merely decent protection or foolproof security.

Besides encryption of data, there is another aspect of security that is often overlooked. This has to do with deletion of data. When you delete your data using the Windows delete command, the data is simply deleted from Windows but is not removed from your hard disk. The chances are that it will lie there for a long time. There are many ways of recovering this data. You may not want this data to fall into the wrong hands. Proper security must take care of this aspect too. A good security program must therefore take care of protecting saved data and completely destroying deleted data without leaving any trace of it.

To learn more about the security features of Secure Notes Organizer see the next topic.