# Security Preferences

The first option will let you tell MacJournal to lock journals automatically after MacJournal is idle for a certain period of time. This only applies to MacJournal, so if you are in another app using the system, MacJournal will still lock after you haven't used MacJournal for that amount of time.

The second section controls backups. MacJournal will automatically back up your data every day by default, but you can change that here to disable it or change the period. Use numbers less than one to back up more frequently (or start a backup manually from the File menu). MacJournal will keep a certain number of backups by default to avoid filling up your computer with backups, but you can disable that (to keep all backups) or change how many backups it keeps. You can also change the location in which MacJournal saves your backups to any folder that you want.

In addition to full data backups in MacJournal's format, MacJournal can also regularly export all of your entries to individual files that you can read outside of MacJournal should you only have the backup but not MacJournal.

The next section controls whether or not MacJournal will temporarily make unlocked encrypted journals available to Spotlight. This does involve temporarily putting decrypted content on your hard disk, so it is disabled by default.

MacJournal can automatically lock your journals when various things happen. By default, MacJournal will stay in the state that you leave it when quitting, but there's an option to lock things automatically when doing that. There's also an option for locking when your system sleeps, or immediately when you switch to another application.

If you have journals inside of other journals that can also lock, the inner journals do not lock when the parent journal locks. However, there is an option here to enable this if you want.

By default, MacJournal randomizes the configuration that it uses to listen for iOS devices that want to sync. This increases security on your machine and in MacJournal. However, this gives some firewalls and network monitoring tools trouble, so you can disable this here to use a fixed configuration that does not change every time that MacJournal launches.

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