Hello Christy,
No, we don’t have a printed manual – but we do have lots of information and introductory videos at https://forum.axcrypt.net/ .
There you will find help and advice about how AxCrypt works, what it does, and what it does not. You should to start with be aware that AxCrypt is a strong file encryption software. It does not “password protect folders” as such, it encrypts files using a password as a key. There is a fundamental difference.
“Password protection” is about access control. Briefly, it means that software will determine if you have the right or access or not, based on a password for example. Windows does this when you use a password for your account for example. The thing with access control is that anyone with administrative access to the system, or direct access to the storage media using different software (for example mounting a Windows hard drive in a Linux system) can bypass access control.
“Encryption” is something else. It “scrambles” the data (in our case file by file) using a secret key to control the process. With strong encryption, the process is computationally infeasible to reverse without knowing the secret key. There is no way to bypass the encryption. Anyone can access the data – but it’s meaningless without knowing the secret key. AxCrypt uses a password to derive a secret key to use for encrypting data.
These two things are similar from a user point of view – a password is requested to access the data. But as I’ve tried to explain above, the actual process is fundamentally completely different.
Please read more at our web site, https://forum.axcrypt.net/ .
