How To Password Protect USB Drive
Learning how to password protect USB drive systems — meaning those little pocket thumb or flash drives — would be a good skill to have handy whenever the time comes to transfer data from your PC or laptop to these little drives. It is a good way of keeping others from accessing all of the data you might have stored on it. So take a bit of time to learn how to encrypt one of them.
The first thing to ensure is that whatever USB drive you intend on protecting via a password and encryption is empty. Once you’ve made sure of that, take the software program you’ve found — because it’s a bit inconvenient to go in and manually encrypt and password protect each file on the USB drive — and then download the program to the USB. Click “select device” and then click “OK.”
After that, you’ll need to then click “next” as a way of examining all of the different encryption methods that the software will present for your use. You will have a certain amount of volume or space available on the USB drive and will need to accept that space and then create a password. Try to come up with a password that is both easy to remember yet extremely difficult to decipher.
After you’ve done all that, the software will ask you to select a starting point that is random in nature in order for encrypting to begin. Click on the “format” link to set the USB drive parameters so that it can be formatted. Again, if there is any data left on the drive prior to formatting it would be a good time to then store it on the computer hard drive.
Once all of that has been done, it’s a matter of using the software program you have found to engage in the password protection and clicking on “mount.” Once you have done that you’ll need to enter your password. After you’ve done the password entry, you will see that the device will be showing in MS Explorer. Just click “dismount” and remove the drive.
You will now have a fully password protected USB drive that is also encrypted, which will make it extremely difficult for others to access your data stored on the drive. Remember, no drive is ever completely hack-proof but you have made a good start toward preventing others from taking your drive and finding out anything on it anytime soon.
Discover out more about how to password protect USB drives and check how to password protect a flash drive.
