Product Reviews

As more of our critical data sits on our desktops and laptops, protecting it has become increasingly important.

Intego's FileGuard X5 is an application that keeps your important documents away from prying eyes by storing them in virtual 'safes' - password-protected folders that can only be opened by authorised users.

The most obvious way to create and manage safes - you can also create them through the menubar or a contextual menu - is through the program's single window. This lists safes alongside chunky buttons that allow you to change their status between three states: open, closed and put away. A safe is open when you double-click its name in the window or its icon in the Finder and enter its password - files can be protected with 128- or 256-bit encryption. Its contents can then be treated as a normal mounted volume. When you close a file it effectively locks it, while to transport a safe - whether via email or on disk - you first put it away. Safes can be opened on any Mac as they are seen as read-only folder, protected by the same password set in FileGuard.

The obvious criticism of FileGuard is that it's underpinned by the same disk image and encryption technology used by Mac OS X Leopard's Disk Utility. Why pay money and go through the FileGuard's

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clunky restart-required installation procedure?

There's no doubt that FileGuard safes are more configurable than ordinary disk images. You can configure settings for each safe to allow data recovery if its password is lost, or allow group access to a safe. And although FileGuard and Disk Utility can create disk images to hold chat transcripts and email folders, it's done automatically in FileGuard. An Assistant mode takes you through their creation when you first run the program.

One other difference is that unlike normal disk images, safes don't appear by default in the Finder's sidebar when opened. Instead, every safe comes with an optional avatar, an icon that floats above other windows when a safe is open/closed, regardless of whether FileGuard is running or not. The avatar's appearance changes according the safe's status, so unlike standard disk images, it's obvious if you've left a safe open. Although it's easy to get confused between avatars if you have more than one on the screen.

Another status indication is offered by the application's Dock icon, which displays a badge showing the number of open safes. Avatars also have a functional role: you can add files to a safe by dragging them over the avatar, and open a safe by double-clicking.

Though not highlighted in the otherwise excellent documentation, the new version of the program adds two significant features. We criticised the circuitous route you had to take in X4 to restore a protected disk to a standard desktop folder, but a new Restore button in the main window does this almost instantly. In X5 you can adjust a safe's settings to securely delete files from the Finder after adding them to a safe.

FileGuard X5's small but important improvements don't make it an essential piece of software, but, free to upgraders, it's an excellent way of protecting important data.