ENCRYPTION IS ONE OF THE fundamental elements of system security, so it's no surprise that Windows Vista includes encryption as part of the operating system (although not in the Home editions). In fact, the Encrypting File System (EFS) has been around since way back in Windows 2000, as a feature built right into the NT file system (NTFS), on which Vista, XP, and Win2K have all been based. In the Enterprise and Ultimate editions, Vista provides an additional security system, BitLocker, which combined with EFS provides a rich encryption package (although BitLocker is designed especially with laptop users in mind). But here we'll just stick with EFS.



The point of including EFS in Windows is to build strong data encryption into the operating system itself, thereby getting rid of both the need to purchase third-party encryption software and the problepls that can result from leaving such an important process to add-on technology. EFS works in conjunction with NTFS and does not work on FAT or FAT32 volumes; in fact, if you copy or move an encrypted folder or file from an NTFS partition to a FAT/FAT32 partition, the file becomes decrypted. In the reverse direction, a folder or file that has not been encrypted becomes encrypted as soon as it is moved into'a previously encrypted folder. In addition to encrypting on a fileby-file basis, you can encrypt all the files inside a given folder automatically by encrypting the folder itself-an easy, efficient approach.