Friday, December 6, 2013

Prevent photos from being deleted by kids

So we love our photos. We try do the safe thing by backing up our photos to the cloud or external hard drives. But there's a problem with this strategy. What if my 4 year old deletes a folder (or many) of photos? I will likely not catch the problem by the time of my next backup, so I'll transfer the deletion of the files/folder to the backup, and they'll be gone forever.

The solution? This ghetto little program called Easy File Locker: http://www.xoslab.com/efl.html. It works beautifully. Files remain viewable, but they cannot be moved or deleted or changed without entering into the easy file locker interface and entering your password to temporarily remove the restriction. There is little/no documentation, but there is a short Youtube video on the instructions.

So maybe that will help someone after I spent the last 60 minutes (and hours over the past few years) trying to find a solution to my problem. Conventional windows security settings didn't work for our setup.