How to create an encrypted Image to store your sensitive Data
In this short tutorial i will show you how to create an encrypted disk image to store your sensitive data. This can be useful to store information like:
- credit card information
- bank information
- digital bills
- personal data
- files nobody else should have access to
Preparation
Think about how much space you approximately need to store your information as you cannot change the size of your image later without formatting it. For this tutorial i will create a 100MB big encrypted image, which should be enough to store text files holding sensitive data.
Step 1 Open Disk Utility
To create your disk image you need to use the built in utility "Disk Utility.app" you can find it in /Applications/Utilitys/Disk Utility.app or start typing disk utility in you spotlight search.
Once opened Disk Utility looks like this:
Step 2 Create New Image
Now what we want to do is create our encrypted image, in order to do that we simply click on the "New Image" button. Once we clicked that button Disk Utility needs a few informations about our new image see screenshot below.
- Save As: this is the name of the image, how it will appear in Finder
- Where: Where do you want to save the image
- Volumename: This name appears in your mounted drives/images list in Finder
- Volumesize: How big should the image be
- Volume Format: We leave that at "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"
- Encryption: We choose 256-bit AES encryption, read more about AES
- Partitions: You could split up your disc image into several partitions but just to save sensitive data we don't need to do this, select Single partition
- Image Format: read/write disk image
As soon as you click "Ok" it will create your image, if that is done you will get a password promt, type in a very secure password, use capitalized characters, numbers and special characers like !#$^*(& but make sure you don't forget this password or you can't access your files.
You can save your password in your keychain but again make sure you cannot forget it. Next click on "Ok" Disk Utility will now automatically mount your image which means you can start saving your files to it.
If you are done reading / writing files to your vault eject it. And if you need access to your files, simply double click your image file to mount it. If you didn't save your image password Finder will ask you every time you want to mount your image.
Conclusion
Now you have a secure place to store all your sensitive data, or just a place to password protect files from users that have access to your user profile.