14 DAY TRIAL // Keeping your data safe is serious business. A system-wide password might not be enough to keep prying eyes from spying on your activity, which is why MacPaw sells Hider 2, a utility that encrypts confidential data on your Mac.
Offered at a discount in celebration of the app’s debut, Hider 2 lets you tuck away and encrypt private data on your Mac, whether it’s confidential documents, photos of you wasted in college, a book you’re writing, electronic bank statements, credit card info, etc.
You can use the program to encrypt and password-protect anything you regard as confidential, and you get features like custom grouping, global shortcut keys, Mavericks tags compatibility, and menubar access.
No one can use Hider or see what you’ve hidden inside without your password, and any new file you add is automatically AES-256 encrypted. External drives are also supported, and you can hide entire folders, instead of selecting individual files.
“Organization is key when it comes hiding and keeping track of files. Hider 2 helps you sort out your data so you don’t have to worry about losing things to the abyss of your hard drive,” says MacPaw. “Create your own custom groups within Hider 2 to keep your data nice and tidy. Nothing is better than clean, categorized hiding.”
You can instantly hide any file using the global hotkey Ctrl+Cmd+H and then lock the app itself using Ctrl+Cmd+L. Hider 2 even has a built-in text editor “for quickly jotting down short blurbs of confidential info,” says MacPaw. What you write is immediately encrypted.
Hider 2 requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or OS X Mavericks, 30MB of free disk space, and additional (temporary) space for the files you’re looking to encrypt.
MacPaw explains, “You should note that even though Hider 2 only requires 30MB for installation, you also need an amount of free space equal to the file you wish to hide. For example, if you wish to hide a file that is 1GB in size, you must have 1GB of free space to encrypt and hide the file. The app will not permanently occupy this free space, it is only temporarily necessary for the encryption function.”
Hider 2 normally sells for $19.99 / €17.99, but it is offered at a special release price: 50% off, at $9.99 / €8.99. MacPaw also updated CleanMyMac 2 earlier today. More on that in a separate report.