Quick Start Wizard

Folder Guard now includes Quick Start Wizard that can guide you through the steps necessary to protect a folder on your computer. It is not necessary to use Quick Start Wizard; you can achieve the same effect using the commands of Folder Guard directly. However, if you are not familiar with Folder Guard and want to get up to speed with it quickly, Quick Start Wizard is a good starting point.

Quick Start Wizard is initially configured so that it automatically starts whenever you run Folder Guard:

The Welcome page of Quick Start Wizard

If you don't want it to start automatically, simply clear the Run Quick Start Wizard every time I start Folder Guard option on the Welcome page. You can run Quick Start Wizard anytime by choosing the Tools - Quick Start Wizard command from the main menu of Folder Guard.

When you press the Next button, Quick Start Wizard prompts you to select the folder you want to protect:

Select the folder to protect

Note that at this point no protection is actually taking place: the Quick Start Wizard is only gathering information about the folder you want to protect and how exactly you want to protect it. You will be prompted to enable the protection at a later point.

The next page lets you specify the protection method for the folder you've selected:

The folder protection method

If you want to lock the folder with a password, select the first option offered, and also click on the button to set up the unlocking password for the folder. In this case, Quick Start Wizard will apply the empty and no access attributes to the folder for you, to make it restricted.

The second option lets you specify the protections attributes of the folder, such as read-only, or hidden. If you want to hide the folder, or to make it read-only, then select this option and the following pages will let you to select the desired protection attributes for the folder.

At this point Folder Guard is ready to start protecting the folder according to the choices you have made. Or, you can choose to set up the protection for another folder (or even start over from scratch) before enabling the protection:

Enable protection of the folders

Finally, Quick Start Wizard asks you whether you want to configure your computer so that the protection will be enabled automatically for you each time Windows starts up:

Enable protection at Windows startup

Normally you would want to select the first option; however, if you want to enable the protection only temporarily, select the second option instead.

Note that you can run Quick Start Wizard again, after closing it, by choosing the Tools - Quick Start Wizard command from the main menu of Folder Guard.

Note also that Quick Start Wizard lets you perform only the most basic operations. For the more complex tasks, such as protecting files, setting up different protection settings for different users, configuring the filters, etc., use the commands of Folder Guard directly.