How do I encrypt things?

[DireWolf]

There used to be a product called TrueCrypt, which I liked. It offered plausible deniability because you could make a encrypted file, anywhere on your hard drive, which appeared normal, like random data, but was really an encrypted data store.

The new equivalent/successor to TrueCrypt is called VeraCrypt, which also works very well for its intended purposes. Definitely worth a look if TC was something you found useful.

Is encrypting and password protecting a specific folder or file something I can do? If someone can point me in the correct direction I'm sure I can do some research on my own, but this is something I know nothing about. Please point me in the right direction.

If you take a look at VeraCrypt and it doesn't really hit the mark, feel free to PM me and I'd be happy to provide a bit more assistance offline.

Normally I'd elaborate a bit more here, but I quite literally spent all day explaining to a roomful of application architects and developers how to build & integrate extremely high-volume crypto/key-mgt systems...

An iron key might do what you need

Also a good suggestion worth looking into - these have come a long way since originally released.