We all have one or more files that we wish to keep private and protected from being accessed by anyone else. For example, the income tax documents for last ten years or the pictures you took with your high school friends during a really crazy party. These personal files can be easily protected and guarded against unwanted access by encrypting them with software like Bitlocker that comes built inside some versions of Windows. But Bitlocker is ideal for encrypting a large number of files or the entire partitions. If you want to encrypt just one or two files, then perhaps a smaller and portable tool like AES Protect would be a perfect choice. It is a free software for Windows that can encrypt and password protect your files on the hard disk and USB drives. It uses very strong AES 256 bit cipher to encrypt your files providing you the protection of unbreakable encryption.
AES Protect comes in a package with many other encryption tools, but the other tools including AES Metal and AES Command are different tools and are not really necessary for the functioning for the AES Protect. Since it is a portable tool, you can just double-click on the AES Protect.exe file to launch the program. The program is only 26 KB in size and consumes only 1 MB of RAM.
You can click on the Open and Save As buttons to choose the source file and the destination file respectively. Then you have to enter the pass-phrase twice before you can click on the Start button to encrypt the file. You can toggle the mode by clicking on the Encrypt button which changes to Decrypt to indicate the program mode (whether you are encrypting the file or decrypting an already encrypted file). And the Hide button on top allows you to hide everything from the eyes of nosy people looking over your shoulder.
Conclusion: AES Protect is very small, fast and portable encryption tool that uses the powerful AES cipher for encrypting your files. However it can encrypt only one file at a time, and therefore it is perfect for encrypting just a small number of files.
You can download AES Protect from https://www.directorandgeneral.com/aes-protect.