There are several ways and tools to keep your private files and folders from being seen by others – password protecting, encrypting etc. Clotho is a free tool that works a little differently. It lets you hide any file or folder inside of another file (called the mask file).

Download and install Clotho from http://clotho.ixenity.tk.

Using Clotho is very easy.

• Just select the Mask file.  The mask file is the file into which you want to hide your secret file/folder.
• Now select the secret File/Folder that you want to hide.
• Choose how and where you want to save the resulting file.

Just click the ‘Pack’ button and the job is done. The resulting file will open and behave like normal but all the time hiding your secret file or folder inside it. To view the hidden file again go to the UPack tab in Clotho, select the mask file with hidden content and click ‘Unpack’. There are few options that you can use at the time of packing, like, Encrypting the data, Compressing the data, scrambling the data etc for additional security.

Do remember that not all file formats can be used as mask. However, most media filetypes like jpg, mp3, wav, flv etc are supported. I tried using a Word 2010 file (.docx) as the mask. While Clotho was able to hide a file inside Word file and was also able to unpack it successfully, I could not open the resulting docx file. MS Word threw up an error saying there were unreadable contents in the file.

Still, clotho seems like a good way to keep your private stuff private.