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USB flash drives are portable. Which makes them easy to keep with you but unfortunately also makes them east to mislay.
The solution to protecting your USB drive depends on what you need to do and how much of the drives contents you need to protect.
If you only want to protect a handful of files on your USB flash drive then it’s probably simplest to save them with a password. Programs like Word and Excel make it fairly easy to do this. Before saving your file, go to the Tools menu. Choose Options and then click on the Security tab. You’ll be given the option to enter a password to open the file. Although the box only asks you to enter the password once, you’ll be asked to type it in again before you can exit from the Options dialog box. But once you’ve done that, you’re on your own. So make sure you can remember the password otherwise you’ll have to resort to a program to recover passwords before you can open it again!
For many people, this will be enough protection. After all, those photos of beautiful looking scenery from your recent holiday probably don’t need to be stored securely.
If you need to store lots of data securely on your USB drive then it makes sense to password protect the complete drive.
For instance, you wouldn’t want other people to be able to get hold of your company’s data if your drive went astray, would you?
If you don’t mind splitting your USB drive into multiple “volumes” (kind of like virtual disk drives) and providing the files you want to protect aren’t too large, you may want to check out the free program Cryptainer LE. The biggest snag is that the maximum volume size is 25Mb. So if you’re dealing with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, you’ll be fine. But if you’re looking at Access databases and the like, it’s likely that you’ll soon run over this limit. It’s also a pain in the neck to have to continually swap drives, so remember that when you’re considering this program.
The best compromise I’ve found is a neat piece of software called Securestix which lets you password protect specific folders on your USB drive. This is a good solution – you can leave those holiday photos for all to see whilst making sure that your backup copy of your login passwords and your company data are securely locked away.
Securestix even comes with a password hint option (you don’t have to use this, but it’s there anyway) so that you can remember long forgotten passwords in much the same way that web sites let you get back a password from their secure servers.
The program is very simple to use and very affordable.
You can download your copy instantly from this link.
