Exces is one of the smaller apps that came with the recent MacHeist Bundle, which is intended to create secure “vaults” to store sensitive data. It’s a great alternative to Mac OS X’s clunky FileVault for users that want to protect some, but not all, of their sensitive data.

Exces creates a concept of a “vault” to store your files. Although the terminology sounds kind of intimidating, it’s actually nothing more than a special version of a disk image, which uses the powerful (and not yet cracked) AES-128 encryption standard to keep the data in the disk image safe.

When you open Exces, you have the option of creating a new vault or opening an existing one. When you create a new vault, you first select a place to save it, and then can set a password for it. Exces also includes support for Mac OS X’s Password Assistant which gives you tips on how strong your password is and can suggest them for you. However, Exces does not provide a way to change the password of the vault once you’ve set it, which to me seems like a big gap in the features.

When you open a vault (in a .exc extension), Exces prompts you to enter the vault’s password. Once you’ve unlocked the vault, a disk image for that vault opens in the Finder. At that point, you can transfer files from/to the vault and edit files in the vault and do anything that you would do as though it was a normal disk image. When you click Lock in Exces or when you eject the disk image in Finder, the vault is locked and the disk image is ejected.

Essentially all that Exces is is a piece of software that creates, unlocks, and locks these special AES-128 bit encrypted disk images; that’s all the interacting that it does with the user, the rest takes place in the Finder. Once you get used to it though, this doesn’t feel like a deficiency, and it’s also got some great graphics. However, the lack of the ability to change the password once set seems like a big gap to me, and it really doesn’t do a whole lot given that it costs $15.

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Tags: disk image, encryption, Mac, MacHeist, review, Software, utility, vault