Product Reviews

Your desktop PC and its files may seem safe, but if your system is stolen you could lose a lot more than the physical hardware; thieves could steal your important data, too. If you're going to store important financial or other information on your PC, you should keep it encrypted. StompSoft's Digital Vault is a cheap way of doing this.

Through its main menu, you can create and access an unlimited number of encrypted vaults. You don't have to define the size of each vault when it's created, and they'll grow in size dynamically when you add files. Each vault is protected by a password that you specify, and

It's a shame that the software doesn't integrate with Windows. A new entry on the right-click context-sensitive menu or a new drive in My Computer, for example, would make it much easier to use.

We found that viewing an encrypted file decrypts it to your hard disk. When you close the vault, the file is deleted from your hard disk and securely shredded so it can't be undeleted. However, if your PC crashes or you lose power, the unencrypted file remains available on your PC. In the event of an error, the software should have a clean-up procedure to wipe potentially unsecured files. We also found that opening a vault could be slow, and it didn't always immediately display the full contents. In several situations we had to add a new file to the vault to get a full index listing. Other vaults, however, worked fine every time.

Digital Vault is a lot cheaper and easier to use than its main rivals, such as DESlock+, but it doesn't have the same level of protection and its failure to display the full contents of a vault every time is annoying.