Hi, I have a WD My Passport Ultra portable drive which comes with password protection to secure the data in case of loss. But I also have a Seagate one which does NOT come with such a feature. Is there another method I could use to password-protect these drives, perhaps built-in to Windows 10? I would probably prefer that anyway because I don't like using the pre-installed software that comes on portable drives...
If you have Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise you can use BitLocker.
This seems to be free:
https://www.timeatlas.com/password-protect-usb-drive/
Passwording USB drives would be nice but the ones I use have to be accessible from any computer I happen to be working on, would have to have any such software stored only on the drive and be OS-independent.
So if I use the portable drive as a MIRROR (daily or weekly backup), will I be creating additional headaches for myself by activating BitLocker on such drives? Does this mean I will need to encrypt the new data everytime something is modified? And if so, will it be done automatically?
Here is another suggestion
http://www.imoresoft.com/folder-lock.html
I think you'd find your WD My Passport is also encrypting the data, although this article suggests it isn't as secure as we might hope.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/29955...pose-data.html
My experience of Bitlocker is that once you've done the initial encryption (and that's only an issue when you've got existing data on the drive, not on a new one), performance is reasonable.
Hi there
I might be being obtuse here but if the drives are PORTABLE why in the world would you need to password protect them -- IMO after you've used them simply remove them -- no physical drive = no access !! -- Simple.
Am I missing something here -- seems people are creating a problem where none exists.
Now I CAN understand why data from say a corporate network should be protected from being copied to an external USB drive but that's another issue entirely.
Cheers
jimbo
I use Veracrypt. VeraCrypt - Home
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