1. From the Home screen, tap on “Settings”.
2. Go to “General” and then “Passcode Lock”
3. Tap on “Turn Passcode On”.
4. You will be prompted to enter a four digit passcode. Type in any arbitrary four digit code to be your password.
5. You will be re-prompted to re-enter this password. And then it is set. The passcode lock setting should now show “On”.
When your iPad is idle for a certain duration, the screen will go black and you would have to wake it up by clicking on the Home button which will get you the “Slide to unlock” screen. This time duration of when the “Slide to Unlock” screen appears is set in the “Auto-Lock” setting as shown above. It can set that to be five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or never.
However, your passcode may not be asked every time that you “slide to unlock”. That depends on another time duration settings in “Settings -> General -> Passcode Lock -> Require Passcode” as shown below.
By default, this setting is set to “immediately” which means that whenever the “Slide to unlock” screen comes up, the password as required.
You can set the time duration for require password to be after one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, after one hour, or after four hours. The lowered the time duration, the more frequently your password is prompted and hence more secured.
Having Complex Password
Speaking of security… if you feel that a four digit passcode is not complex enough. You can turn off “Simple Passcode” in “Settings -> General -> Passcode Lock -> Simple Passcode” and slide the setting to be “Off”. Now you can have a more complex passcode with alphanumeric characters and symbols.
Forgotten Password
But be sure to remember your password. If you forgot your password, refer to the knowledge base article on Apple.com [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1212]. It says …
“If you cannot remember the passcode, you will need to restore your device using the computer with which you last synced it. This allows you to reset your passcode and resync the data from the device (or restore from a backup). If you restore on a different computer that was never synced with the device, you will be able to unlock the device for use and remove the passcode, but your data will not be present.”
Auto-Delete Data
To enable extra data protection, you can set your iPad to automatically delete your data whenever an incorrect password is entered 10 times in a row. This is set in “Settings -> General -> Passcode Lock -> Erase data”.
On that same Passcode Lock settings screen, there are options for you to change the passcode and to turn off the pass code (as shown above).