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Sunday, May 23, 2010

How To Password Protect Data On Your USB Drive/Pen drive?





There are many ways to password protect USB drive. Some are reliable, some are not; some are effective, some are not; some are affordable, some are not and the list goes on and on... Sometimes people use software to protect their devices while many other times they want simple tips and tricks to hide their data from prying eyes.

First and the foremost thing is to figure out your requirements that what level of security you want for your flash drive. For the highest level of security you can use file and folder encryption software like Folder Lock that uses advanced encryption standard 256-bit encryption which the most secure level of data security and if you want simple way to password protect USB drive you can choose among many USB locking software.

USB flash drives are everywhere. You will find them in offices, schools, colleges, universities, seminars, hospitals, dorms, business meetings and so on... These drives and many others like pen drive, jump drive, thumb drive and memory sticks are being used to transfer files and other important documents between home and office and from one computer to another.

Since they are light-weighted and small in size, they have become the ideal choice for carrying and transferring data from one place to another. Although their small size is a virtue but it poses a great risk of privacy breach just in case if you have lost your flash rive somewhere or it get stolen.

Because of their small size, it is inevitable that you cannot prevent them from getting lost or stolen that arises the need to password protect USB drives so that if they get stolen or lost, you will not have to worry about the data. This is because when you password protect USB drive, it always asks for the password that you set earlier before giving access to the data that it contain. In this way, password protection prevents the risk of privacy breach.

According to a rough estimate about 2.5 million dollars lost have been recorded just because of the lost or stolen USB flash drives by company professionals and employees. The best approach to prevent this risk is to password protect USB drive so that whenever anyone wants to access its data, he has to enter the correct password else he would not get the access.

For this purpose, there are many security applications available in the market that can password protect your USB flash drive and other storage devices that you boot with USB port. There is a huge variety from USB encryption software to USB locking software. I personally do not prefer encryption software because of the complicated encryption algorithm or processes, and I think casual and home users would also not prefer the encryption option as they do not want to wallop themselves with time taking and complex encryption procedure.

I'm using "Rohos Mini drive" and its one of the good USB locking software to password protect USB drive and other storage devices. Rohos Mini Drive enables you to create a secure, virtual partition on any USB drive, allowing you to have a portion of your drive password protected. You can define a custom size for the partition and it to securely store sensitive documents, while leaving the rest of the drive for non-sensitive files. Once unlocked you can access and use the secure volume just like any other drive and manage your files with Windows Explorer. When the drive is disconnected, the secure partition is hidden in a password protected executable and remains inaccessible until it is unlocked by you. The secure volume can be unlocked from any computer it does not require Administrative Privileges or Rohos Mini Drive to be installed. The program can create partitions up to 2 GB in size, if you require larger volumes, a full version is available for purchase.

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