How To Password Protect Your USB Drive

USB flash drives are portable. Which makes them easy to keep with you but unfortunately also makes them east to mislay.

The solution to protecting your USB drive depends on what you need to do and how much of the drives contents you need to protect.

If you only want to protect a handful of files on your USB flash drive then it's probably simplest to save them with a password. Programs like Word and Excel make it fairly easy to do this. Before saving your file, go to the Tools menu. Choose Options and then click on the Security tab. You'll be given the option to enter a password to open the file. Although the box only asks you to enter the password once, you'll be asked to type it in again before you can exit from the Options dialog box. But once you've done that, you're on your own. So make sure you can remember the password otherwise you'll have to resort to a program to recover passwords before you can open it again!

For many people, this will be enough protection. After all, those photos of beautiful looking scenery from your recent holiday probably don't need to be stored securely

How To Protect Your Complete USB Flash Drive

If you need to store lots of data securely on your USB drive then it makes sense to password protect the complete drive.

For instance, you wouldn't want other people to be able to get hold of your company's data if your drive went astray, would you?

If you don't mind splitting your USB drive into multiple "volumes" (kind of like virtual disk drives) and providing the files you want to protect aren't too large, you may want to check out the free program Cryptainer LE. The biggest snag is that the maximum volume size is 25Mb. So if you're dealing with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, you'll be fine. But if you're looking at Access databases and the like, it's likely that you'll soon run over this limit. It's also a pain in the neck to have to continually swap drives, so remember that when you're considering this program.

The best compromise I've found is a neat piece of software called Securestix which lets you password protect specific folders on your USB drive. This is a good solution - you can leave those holiday photos for all to see whilst making sure that your backup copy of your login passwords and your company data are securely locked away.

Securestix even comes with a password hint option (you don't have to use this, but it's there anyway) so that you can remember long forgotten passwords in much the same way that web sites let you get back a password from their secure servers.

The program is very simple to use and very affordable. You can download your copy instantly from this link.

What Do You Want To Password Protect On Your USB Flash

USB Flash Drive

Kingston DataTraveler I - 4 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive DTI/4GB

Amazon Price: $5.95 (as of 01/10/2012)

This 4 GB USB flash drive lightens your load without emptying your wallet. As easy as click and drag, the DataTraveler holds just about any file you can think of--from reports and pictures, to spreadsheets and other important documents. It works with virtually any device with a USB port--even cross-platform from Macintosh to PC and vice versa.

More About USB Flash Drives

Category: file - :SanDisk Cruzer Micro.png|thumb|SanDisk Cruzer Micro, a brand of USB flash drives

Category: file - :MicroSDFDrive.JPG|thumb|A Kingston card reader which accepts Micro SD memory cards (Transcend card shown inserted) and acts as a USB flash drive, resulting in a size of approximately 2 cm in length, 1 cm in width and 2 mm in thickness

Category: File - :IBM card storage.NARA.jpg|thumb|Punched cards in storage at a U.S. Federal records center in 1959. All the data visible here would fit on a 4 GB flash drive.

A USB flash drive is a data storage device that consists of flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30 g.Frequently Asked Questions About USB Flash Drives. Peripherals.about.com (2010-06-17). Retrieved on 2011-05-18. drives of 256 gigabytes (GB) are available,Baker, Jeff (July 20, 2009) "Kingston unveils 256GB thumb", MobileWhack.com and storage capacities as large as 2 terabytes (TB) are planned, with steady improvements in size and price per capacity expected. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles (depending on the exact type of memory chip used) and 10 years shelf storage time.

AboutCom-Swivel-Pro-Flash "Imation Swivel Pro Flash Drive", About.com, 2008USB flash drives allow reading, writing, and erasing of data, with some allowing 1 billion write/erase cycles in each cell of memory: if 100 uses per day, 1 billion cycles could span 10,000 days or over 27 years. Some devices level the usage by auto-shifting activity to underused sections of memory.

USB flash drives are often used for the same purposes for which floppy disks or CD-ROMs were used. They are smaller, faster, have thousands of times more capacity, and are more durable and reliable because they have no moving parts. Until approximately 2005, most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with floppy disk drives, but floppy disk drives have been abandoned in favor of USB ports.

USB Flash drives use the USB mass storage standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and other Unix-like systems. USB drives with USB 2.0 support can store more data and transfer faster than much larger optical disc drives like CD-RW or DVD-RW drives and can be read by many other systems such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, DVD players and in some upcoming mobile smartphones.

Nothing moves mechanically in a flash drive; the term drive persists because computers read and write flash-drive data using the same system commands as for a mechanical disk drive, with the storage appearing to the computer operating system and user interface as just another drive. Flash drives are very robust mechanically.

A flash drive consists of a small printed circuit board carrying the circuit elements and a USB connector, insulated electrically and protected inside a plastic, metal, or rubberized case which can be carried in a pocket or on a key chain, for example. The USB connector may be protected by a removable cap or by retracting into the body of the drive, although it is not likely to be damaged if unprotected. Most flash drives use a standard type-A USB connection allowing plugging into a port on a personal computer, but drives for other interfaces also exist.

USB flash drives draw power from the computer via external USB connection. Some devices combine the functionality of a digital audio player with USB flash storage; they require a battery only when used to play music.