14 DAY TRIAL // Applications designed to restrict access to your files are many, but only few of them offer indeed the security they advertise. M Secure Lock attempts to combine file access restriction with data hiding as a supplementary layer of protection. Its features expand to bolting items in virtual drives and even deny access to USB flash drives.
Sealing information in password-protected containers alone is not an efficient way to maintain privacy as in many cases breaking the passphrase is just a matter of time. Throwing the invisibility cloak over them stands for increased security and hardens the job of anyone trying to take a peek at your documents.
M Secure Lock comes at a price of $12 and advertises a complete suite of options designed to keep your files out of unauthorized persons’ hands regardless if you store them on the local disk or on a USB drive. The application has been designed to restrict any access to data under its lock and key.
Although it can be used portably on removable drives, the desktop installer has to be on the system to in order to be able to launch the portable version. The entire procedure take little time and effort and at the end of it you are required to provide a password that guards the access to the application’s interface. Without it you will not be able to revert any protection measures enforced on the items.
The interface is pretty intuitive and should not give too much trouble as the main options are present in the lower part of the window (the active menu is lit up in colors). The application supports both files and folders and adding them is just as simple as dropping them in the program screen.
However, be careful where you drop them because both the panel showing the items soon to be dealt with as well as the one displaying the elements already under the key accepts input. Also, there is no alert if you accidentally drop the same item twice in the same window; this will simply increase the count of the added files.
When file locking is performed you also have the possibility to hide the items. The entire operation finishes swiftly and with no impact on system resources. As a result all the data involved in the process becomes inaccessible; you won’t be able to move it, delete it, copy it or open it. All you can do in Windows is simply look at the data.
But there is a way to lift all restrictions and view hidden elements as well. Booting in a different operating system (in our case it was as easy as booting Ubuntu off a removable drive) give you full access to the data. Also, in the case of audio files we were able to load them in a player and play them.
The same lock and hide options are available for both files and folders, but M Secure Lock also brings to the table the possibility to lock an entire drive. In our case this remained only an entry in the feature list because it did not work at all.
Each time we tried to create the virtual drive the application would open “My Documents” folder in Windows Explorer, despite the fact that it announced the Drive Z:\ was created. The messages worked fin for both locking and unlocking the drive but M Secure Lock failed to create the location for moving sensitive data so that it is protected.
Another feature we could not test is USB Secure. This part of the program is supposed to install a portable copy of the application on an USB drive and allow us to lock and hide data in a folder specially created for the job. It is supposed to work on any sort of disk, but during our tests it failed to do its job on FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. It would always return a file not found error message and cease activity. If this feature works, in the trial version only 15MB of data can be added in the secure folder on the portable device.
M Secure Lock has an expiration date for evaluation set to 15 uses and you are reminded of the amount of uses left in the upper part of the application screen. We tested the program against a bunch of file formats but MP3 seems to somehow evade the chains of M Secure Lock as we were able to play this format in foobar2000.
The application is not too stable either as we faced crashes by simply dropping data into the interface. Additionally, the functionality is crippled by two instruments that did not work in our case: Drive Lock and USB Secure.
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