Thread: Calling all Ubuntu Experts

Is there a way to create a folder that can only be accessed with a password? I want to hide my torrents files because I'm a bit paranoid but I still want easy access to them.

I suggest TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux - It will encrypt a single folder, or an entire partition.

You could always just hide the folder by adding a .(period, dot) in front of the name also: .torrents
Although with certain command line options it will still show up, so this is not the most effective way to hide files/folders.

Just remember that if you use true crypt and forget your password the data will be useless to you. Also I seriously doubt if your torrent client will be able to read/write to/from that folder once it is encrypted. So the . option may be a better choice while seeding.

Edit: Another option would be to:

sudo chown -R root:root /home/username/torrents

That way you would have to sudo (be root) in order to access that folder.

I'm not sure exactly how ubuntu works because I don't like the compile myself but it should automatically make you enter a password every-time you try to access a folder assuming you aren't logged in as root (which would be stupid in-and-of-itself)

Is this to protect the contents from someone stealing your computer and accessing your data, or on a system that stays running/logged in which someone can sit down at and use as 'you'? Are you the only user, or is it a shared system?

There is no way to have it so when you try to change into a directory it prompts you for a password (that I know of, at the moment, though i see a spec proposal type system has been mentioned before). There is the ownership of the directory method where you logged in as yourself, su to another user before changing into that directory (or run a new GUI based file browsing window as the required user). But if you leave the computer locked, they're not getting in as you in the first place. And if you head down that separate ownership path the torrent client would have to be run as the user who owns the torrent directory.

If you head down the encryption path, that only protects you from theft of the system. As the system boots and mounts the directory you enter in the password to decrypt it. Once it is mounted it behaves like any other directory in an unencrypted fashion. So leaving a system logged in, with an encrypted folder mounted is also pointless.

Q

Yeah it's my own personal computer, I think I will go with restrict access to it and also the dot thing. Well dot thing first and see if that relieves my fears

Security through obscurity, hmmmmm.

Q

change the permission of u r folder
by this cmd
chmod 700
this will only allow the owner of the folder to access the folder

Hide your torrents from whom? Desktop or laptop? Without more information it's impossible to give a recommendations. You can have some very elaborate or some very simple schemes

The comment about about changing permissions makes the most sense.

The idea about making it a hidden folder makes the least sense, unless you are trying to hide it from people with no computing knowledge

You can have password protected directories in Linux by using CFS (Cryptographic File System) which is based on NFS. Read this article:

Using Cryptographic Filesystem with Linux