Shadow

Needless to say that it’s a good idea to keep your personal files secured, or those which can compromise your own, or a business activity. Working on a computer has its advantages, in the sense that you benefit from a whole range of specialized applications which can encrypt important data, which is the case with Shadow.

On the bright side of things, the application is portable, so you don’t even have to go through a setup process to make it work. This makes it your personal encryption tool, letting you carry it around so nobody has access to the method of decrypting files. Registry entries are not affected, so the target PC is not put at risk.

The visual design is pretty intuitive, with several steps required to finish the operation. The application can be used to encrypt just about any kind of file type, regardless of size or format. Although only one file can be targeted at a time, you can place all of them inside an archive, and encrypt it.

The whole operation is based on a password which you need to write in two fields as a protection method. You can use a security mode and layout model, which allows the application to better define the application. These are separately specified, and come as ranges of characters, such as from A to Z.

You can choose to save the encrypted file to a custom location, which is by default the source folder. Unfortunately, the password field comes with a pretty disturbing restriction, in the sense that it needs to be exactly 32 characters long. This not only makes it difficult to create, but also to remember.

All things considered, we can state that Shadow is not really an advanced method of encrypting files, even though algorithms used here make it look like it. Even though it can secure important files, the strict password field can quickly make you look for alternatives.