Most of us have at least a few sensitive documents stored on our computers. Sometimes these are financial documents (bank statements, credit card balances, investment portfolio information), while other times we simply have files and documents we wish to keep away from prying eyes of family and friends. These files can be hidden by way of encryption or simply placing them in spots no one would typically think to look at them. With a free program for Windows called Disguise Folders, we can now hide folders in plain sight. Here’s how it works.
You’ll first want to head over to the program announcement page at The Windows Club, located here.
Once there, scroll down and click the download icon.
Once downloaded, you’ll need to extract the ZIP archive.
You’ll now have a folder called “DF” on your Desktop (or wherever else you extracted the archive). Inside it is a link to the Disguise Folders website as well as the actual program. For our purposes, we’ve moved the application to our Desktop. It can now be run from anywhere.
When first launched, you’ll see the following window.
To disguise a folder, simply click the Disguise Folder button, then select the folder you wish to hide.
We’ve selected a folder called Secret Stuff
Once we’ve selected the folder we wish to disguise, we need to choose which System Folder or Program we wish to disguise it as; as you can see, there is a large list.
Once you’ve made your selection, click the Disguise Now button. It will now be hidden in plain sight, appearing as whatever option you chose.
As we selected the Power Options module, our Secret Stuff folder now appears – and behaves – as the standard Power Options program. If you double click to open your folder, you’ll instead get whatever program you’ve chosen!
Of course, we want to actually use whatever is in our disguised folder eventually. To do that, we need to recover it, which we do by clicking the Recover Folder button and selecting our disguised folder.
Now, click the Recover Now button (remembering to provide the name you wish your recovered folder to have), and in a second, your original folder is back in place.
And that’s it! Disguise Folders is a simple way to keep all your sensitive, secret files out in the open, without anyone being the wiser. It isn’t fool-proof, of course, but for keeping your files away from basic, prying eyes, it’s a nice option.