Reviewer, 2007-12-25 08:17:00

Dark Files provides means to keep your files protected. You can choose who gets access to what files on your computer. This program provides three levels of protection to suit any user; "Hidden", "Read Only", "Full Control".

Pros: Dark Files is an application that adds protection to files/folders in a system. Three levels of protection are possible. These are designating the files totally hidden. In that case except for the administrator no other user can even see the designated files. Read only designation disable writing to the file, deleting or any other means of modifying them. Full control will allow all the operations. This is possible not only a folder but all the sub folders and files included in it. Yu could do it individually too of course. Wild cards allow adding these protections to a specific type of files such as *.doc for example. The protection applies not only to data files but also to program files. Protection settings in Dark Files apply uniformly to all kinds of drives including the system drives, network drives mapped to the system and removable drives.

These settings can be done for each of the users of the system. Default set of protection can be set by defining user groups. When a user is not in the main user profiles, the guest protection settings apply. Protections work independently of the programs using the particular file, it’ll hold even when the program has been closed.

Cons: Protecting files as hidden, read only or full control on removable media through this program may not be useful. The control possibly would work on similar platforms, basically all windows versions. Unless data is encrypted there can be no real protection. How does the protection work on other platforms! Biggest concerns of protecting data are about removable media in any system anyway.

I wonder how many personal systems are used by more than one person, may be two. Would such elaborate arrangement make sense now!

Overall rating is 3 stars.