password protect a mountable drive

[stingrae]

Hey all,

I was just wondering if anybody knew how to password protect an external drive.

For instance, I have a small 30gb USB drive that I use to backup my laptop every night. Last week I lost the drive on the street. Thankfully though, it had my name and contact and the person who picked it up phoned me.

The thing is that this drive obviously has a lot of important information on it. Is there a way to password protect it, so that if it does get lost again, then at least i know the data is safe.

I used to PGP disk, but the version I have does not work with XP, and the new PGP Disk is too expensive.

Any ideas? Suggestions?

[Ideas Man]

Format the thing with the NTFS file system and either encrypt the data using Windows XPs encryption and/or restrict access using NTFS permissions.

[sahbasita]

I'm not sure if you format the USB storage device(flashdisk) with such an NTFS system file will cover your data from any stranger one, who tries to 'stolen' your data, what if i also use an NTFS system file (such XP also) and plug your flashdisk into my computer system ?? I think my system will read all the content.

[Ideas Man]

No, if you use NTFS permissions to restrict who can read the files, they should transport and not allow you to access them. You have to set the permissions up right and nobody should be able to see the data except the use with permissions to.

[plenderj]

You can bypass the NTFS permissions if you have physical access to the drive. However, if you encrypt the data, it shouldn't be recoverable - as far as I know...

[Ideas Man]

Yeah i was just thinking that, but to the causal user, it would stop them. Windows XP's encryption would do the trick I'd imagine, just make sure you backup your certificate, I didn't and lost lots of data .

[village idiot]

I've been using Private Disk Light
www.dekart.com, and had no problems with it. Dont know if it works on external drives, but works great on my PCs. Creates a ffilw which then acts like a drive, so I can take it between PCs. The program required to run it is only a few hundred K so I carry that around too and install as required. Its has a pretty small footprint when running too.

[Lightning]

Zip the backup, with a password (WinZip 9 has very strong encrypting), should work

[stingrae]

hey Vilage Idiot,

that's EXACTLY what i was looking for!!

do you know how good the encryption is?

[village idiot]

According to the info with it its an AES algorithm, which means its rather good. Its very fast so I'd guess its RC4. I'm no cypher ninja but I'm happy with the encryption level it offers.

Only small problem is it seems you have to be logged onto the computer with admin privileges for it to work properly. I have tried without and it has a few glitches, but otherwise its fine.