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How to encrypt files in Windows

Most of us have some rather sensitive files on our PCs. Whether it’s our tax returns, financial records, password lists (seriously, just use a password manager already), or just files you don’t want anyone to see under any circumstances, we all have our reasons for wanting a bit more security. This means that it’s time to get into encryption, which is where a drive, file, or folder is encoded (encrypted) so as to make it unreadable to anyone except the person with the right key to decrypt it. The upside is that anyone attempting to access it without the password will fail, and the downside is that if you lose the encryption key (usually a password), whatever you had encrypted will be gone forever, unless there’s a way to recover it.

Luckily, in Windows you have options on how to do

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