Tips to encrypt a USB Drive

Tips to encrypt a USB Drive
While transferring data, you don't want other people to see. You should be using secure media
for transferring the data. A USB is a device that hides the data better than something easily
within a pocket. Secure flash drives are only about the size of a small matchbox, but have the
features of super securing your data. You can get a peace of mind knowing your data has been
securely encrypted even if you lose your flash drives.
USB devices are capable of storing huge amount of data. Images, Videos, Files, Documents,
Presentations, etc. all formats can be stored in the USB devices. When you get access to such
huge capacity, you should prefer to keep all your important data on USB devices to keep it with
you all the time. However, the portability of such important data also raises questions about
the protection concern. USB drives are portable and very small in size. Sometimes USB to DH+
is used to connect devices. Recently, manufacturers are aiming for making these devices even
smaller with each evolutionary invention, which means you can easily lose huge amounts of
data in an instant. So encrypting or password protecting your USB device or the sensitive data is
of extreme importance. Encrypt your USB drive with a password in such a way that when others
try to access it, it needs protection that is extremely hard to break.
Method 1: Password Protect Individual Files
If you don’t have extremely sensitive data to protect, then there is no need for encrypting the
whole drive. You can just password protect the data using a third-party tool. Only those folders
and files which are important you can secure them in Windows. Folder Lock does a great job for
this purpose.
Method 2: Encrypt a Part of the USB For sensitive data, simple password protection is not
enough to secure your device. You can also encrypt only a separate partition in a USB drive.
After this, you can add all important data in that partition. By following this method, you can

easily access all your unprotected data without any need for a password and access the
important data by just entering the password.
Method 3: Whole Drive Encryption
For this purpose, we can use various tools such as DiskCryptor or Microsoft's BitLocker. It is free
to use an open source tool that consists of a really simple interface which makes it simple to
connect. Microsoft's BitLocker is quite complex and only supports Ultimate versions of
Windows 7 and above.
If you are using a Mac to encrypt your flash drive, you will need to make some slight
modifications to that drive beforehand. Apple makes use of the HFS+ file system to encrypt
media on its devices. Therefore, first, you need to format it using that filesystem. Many tools
can encrypt, and password protects your data. However, most, require rights from
administrator to run on any given computer.
Original source by: https://medium.com/@vs3475474/tips-to-encrypt-a-usb-drive-
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