OK, I lied, but I got you here to read this. I get this question all the time, "how do I create a password protected folder, area, etc. on my computer?" The answer is, you create a password protected disk image.

You know how when you download a piece of software or an update, then you double click on it and it mounts a white disk on your desktop? That's a disk image that you clicked on and it contains the software, files, etc. inside. One benefit to this is that the software maker can insure that all the files arrive the way they intended.

Guess, what? You can create your own disk images to protect your sensitive data.

1) Open up Disk Utility (it's in your Utilities folder, in your Applications Folder)

2) Click the New Image button next to the Burn button, or choose New Image from the File menu.

3) Choose a location to save your disk image to. Somewhere like your documents folder.

4) Choose the size of your disk image. The default is 40MB, however, you can choose custom and make it any size you want. It should be big enough to hold the files/folders you want to protect and you should probably allow some room for growth.

5) Choose the Encryption setting of AES-128 (recommended) from the Encryption popup menu

6) Give your disk image a name at the top of the dialog box - I used "personal" in this example

7) Click the Create button and be prepared to wait a moment or two. The larger the disk image the longer it will take to create it. It could take as long as a few minutes for a disk image over 1GB.

8) The next screen that pops up will be the screen asking you to assign a password to this disk image. This should be a password that you'll remember and different from the rest of your system passwords.

9) Be sure to UNCHECK "remember passsword (add to Keychain)" in my opinion this should be OFF by default. Most users don't lock their keychains. So what good is putting a password on this if all someone has to do is double click on your disk image and it opens anyway because the password has been remembered?

10) Click OK

11) In a few seconds your disk image will mount on the desktop. You can then copy anything you want to it. Once you are done copying your sensitive data files to it, you can then eject it by clicking the little Eject button in the sidebar of any finder window.

12) The next time you want to access that data, go to where you saved your disk image (in my case Documents) and double click on it. It will ask you for your password and then mount the disk.