At present, our society revolves around information. Whether it be for businesses, schools, corporations, and similar institutions, they would inevitably create many documents for agreements, records, and more. These papers might be confidential and may cause severe problems if not handled properly. Aside from secure and proper file management, there are many other things that you can do to protect your PDF files. They can range from watermarking, making backups, installing anti-malware protection, and so on. Learn how these five tricks can make you ease your worries and let you relax regarding your files.
How to Watermark your PDFs
Watermarking is one of the oldest and proven to be valuable ways of securing one’s documents. It is the act of superimposing some image or text above another intellectual property. When you add watermark to PDF files, they should have the right opacity to still let other people access the contents, but the goal of prohibiting other people from claiming ownership of your work is achieved.
Copyright
Yes, you have read that right. Copyright issues would forever be a headache for many. Some people on the web can just download your file, upload it on their social media platform, and pass it off as their intellectual property. Though this action is to be frowned upon, it is indeed true. You can prevent this situation from happening by watermarking your PDFs.
With them around, though others can still share your intellectual property, the credit and copyright would be all yours. Mark your assets because it is the fruits of your hard work. Do not let other people steal your credit by adding watermarks to your PDF files.
Status indicator
One application of watermarks is that you can use them to indicate the status of your PDFs. For instance, you would not want others to mishandle documents under review, drafts, and things alike. Let us say that if you inserted a watermark with the text For Review, Confidential, or Draft, it would serve as a reminder for others to handle the file according to its status.
This usage would be particularly beneficial for those who want their files to be kept confidential. As they browse through the pages of the PDFs, there would be a constant reminder that the contents must not be leaked and should be kept private.
Watermarking with PDFBear
By choosing the right opacity and ensuring that its position makes it hard for other people to edit it out, you can ensure that no one would be able to steal your copyright. You can easily do this with online watermarking tools, like PDFBear’s Add Watermark tool. You can finish it in a few steps, but it can help you protect your files in the long run.
- Upload your files to the Add Watermark tool of PDFBear.
- Choose your watermark. You can use any photo of your choice or some text.
- Position your watermark in a suitable area.
- Save the changes and download your watermarked PDF!
4 Tips to Help Protect Your PDF Files
Backup your files
One of the most clever things you can do to ensure that you would not suffer from file loss is back up them. Having duplicates of your files on your external drives or cloud services can make you rest assured that they are safe regardless of file corruption, disk damage, malware, and many more issues.
Of course, you must choose a trusted cloud service or encrypt your external drive to make sure that there won’t be leaks in the future. Always sync your backup storage with the local one to ensure that everything has a duplicate and there are no mismatches in the file versions.
Use strong passwords
Passwords are things that we always encounter, not only when unlocking our mobile devices but our accounts as well. As they are a layer of security for the contents of our devices, we must use strong passwords, make sure no other person knows of them, and regularly update them. Combining symbols, numbers, and alphabets while keeping it long would be your best bet.
PDFs can actually be protected with passwords too. Applying the same thing, use strong keys and only let your recipient know of them if you plan to share your files. Only by ensuring this would you guarantee that other people would have a hard time gaining unauthorized access to your intellectual property.
Install system updates
Did you know that you are putting your devices and files at risk by ignoring system updates? That’s right! Older versions of your operating system comprise vulnerable points which can be breached by hackers easily. By installing all the system updates available for your devices, the security patches included in them solve these security issues.
By keeping your computer up to date, you can ensure that your PDFs won’t be damaged or retrieved by other people easily. Patch those weak points up by installing system updates on your computer today.
Get anti-malware protection
Malware is designed to attack your computer for a variety of ill-intentioned reasons purposefully. For instance, they can infiltrate your computer, make you lose access to your files, corrupt them, and so on. Keeping your guard up against them may be challenging as they are easily accessible on the web.
The basic common sense on navigating the web is keeping your firewall up, not visiting unsafe websites, opening emails from known sources only, and doing things alongside these. It is easy to violate these things, and having a layer of anti-malware protection can prevent adverse outcomes. This way, you can rest assured that you can steer clear of online threats.
Takeaway
Security and safety are something that would not be someone’s concern. As technology advances, security and threat grow side by side as well. We can set some preventive measures to prevent others from stealing our content and leaking confidential information.
Watermarking is one of these things, which can protect your copyright over your intellectual property. You can do this easily with PDFBear’s Add Watermark tool. Do these helpful tips today and start protecting your PDFs! Stay Updated With us for informative blogs.