At this point, external memories stand out not only with their portability, but also with their large storage capacities. If you carry private and confidential data on your external memory, you may be wondering how to protect them. How to Encrypt USB Memory in this article ? Let’s take a closer look at the question.
USB sticks are inexpensive, portable and useful tools for protecting, storing, sharing or backing up digital data. A major disadvantage of portability, however, is security concerns. Someone can easily get the external memory you are using and access your sensitive data from anywhere. Encrypting drives can be a sensible solution to such risks.
How to Encrypt USB Memory?
Here are three different methods you can use to protect a USB stick. All these methods make use of various encryption protocols to keep your data safe, so you can encrypt and protect the entire disk or just specific files.
1- USB Flash Drive Encryption with BitLocker
The simplest way to protect a USB drive is to quickly password protect the entire drive. This way, everything on the drive is safe and any other data you add to the disk in the future will continue to be protected. Currently, there are many third-party applications that allow you to do this, but almost all Windows 10 users can overcome this problem with the built-in encryption tool.
This tool included in Windows 10 is called BitLocker and it works on any type of drive, not just removable USB drives. And let’s not go without saying: It’s completely free and easy to use. Encrypting drives with BitLocker only takes a few seconds:
- Plug the USB drive into your computer.
- Enter ‘This PC’ and right click on the USB drive.
- Click Turn On BitLocker.
- Click on ‘Use a Password to Unlock the Drive’ and enter the same password twice.
- Click ‘Next’.
- In the next window choose where or how you want to get the recovery key.
- Select ‘Encrypt Entire Drive’ and click ‘Next’.
- Select ‘Compatible Mode’ and then click ‘Next’.
- Select Begin Encryption.
After all these steps, you will be asked to enter a password when you want to log in to the drive.
2- Encrypt USB Flash Drive with VeraCrypt
If you want to protect your USB drive but don’t trust the firmware to do so, you can do it with VeraCrypt . VeraCrypt is very simple to use just like BitLocker and comes with many extra features. When it comes to encryption, it can be said that the process is a bit boring in this program, which includes quite a lot of details.
- Click the ‘Create Volume’ button and continue with the ‘Encrypt a non-system partition / drive’ option.
- Continue with ‘Standard VeraCrypt Volume’.
- Select the drive you want to encrypt, press the ‘OK’ and ‘Next’ buttons respectively.
- Proceed with the ‘Encrypt partition in place’ option.
- Choose the encryption method.
- Enter the password and continue.
- Finally, hit the ‘Format’ button and end the encryption. This process can take from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the drive – and its capacity.
After all these steps, you will be asked to enter a password when you want to log in to the drive.
3- Buy Encrypted USB Flash Drive
If you are not a Windows 10 user or want hardware-based protection rather than software-based protection, one of the things you can do is to buy drivers that come with built-in security measures. Some of these drives will come with internal physical keys – such as a password or fingerprint – while others will come with software keys – internal encryption. Also, some may offer both at the same time.
Buying these drives is advantageous as they offer almost military-grade encryption, but can be very, very expensive in some cases.
Conclusion
With these three simple but very effective ways just above, you can perform USB Memory Encryption in the most effective way. You can make your choice based on your needs and privacy requirements. Whichever method you choose, what you need to be sure of is that your documents and files will be protected.