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.
In order to password protect a drive such as a USB it should be empty, first of all. After that, find any one of a dozen good quality encryption programs that are available — some for free — on the Internet and then download the program to the drive. On the download prompt click “select device” and choose your USB drive. After that, 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.
Your USB drive should now be protected via a password and encryption. It’ll be extremely difficult for anyone to hack, though it is always the case that no drive is ever completely safe from decryption or a concerted hack attack. Still, it will not be very easy for someone to just pick up your drive and go through any files you might have stored on it.
