To make sure that your crucial documents are safe and kept secured from getting stolen, you must password protect a flash drive. This blog will teach you how to protect your USB drive with a password.
Most of us are avid users of USB sticks – we depend on these portable drives to hold our crucial work docs and files, and because pen drives are so functional, we can utilize them not only to back up and store our digital files but to also share our docs with other people.
This file-sharing function of USB drives however causes a flash drive safety concern, “How to password protect a flash drive?” To make sure that your crucial folders are secured & kept safe from the wrong people, your password must protect a flash drive. This article will guide you on how to password protect a flash drive.
Few Ways to password protect a flash drive
There are many approaches to how you can password protect USB drives. You can select to encrypt a flash drive or password safe specific files or folders on the flash drive. Below, we have explained different methods to teach you how you can password protect your flash drive and keep your data secure.
Method 1. Encrypt flash Drive-by WINRAR
With the WINRAR, you can combine the contents of your flash drive and encrypt the drive in a folder protected by a password. WINRAR is a type of software that lets you compress folders and encrypt them. Files protected with WINRAR comes with the extension ‘.rar’. To password-protect, the flash drive, follow these easy steps given below.
Step 1 Download WINRAR
To utilize WINRAR, you need to download it from its website. You can use it for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. Install the software once the download is done.
Step 2 Prepare the files to encrypt
Put your flash drive into your computer and decide on the folders or files you want to password-protect. If you want to password-protect all the folders in your flash drive, it is a great idea to combine them all into one file, and then encrypt the same.
Step 3 Encrypt the prepared folder
When all your files are now in an individual folder, right-click the file and choose ‘Add to archive’.
A pop-up will be displayed. In the ‘General’ option, you can rename the encrypted file from the ‘Archive name’.
Choose ‘RAR’ as the format and select ‘Set password’. A pop-up will be displayed. Enter the password you want in the textbox and retype the password in the verification column. Select the box that tells ‘Encrypt file names’, then select ‘OK’. An archive folder with the ‘.rar’ extension will be made.
This is your password-protected flash drive. You will be needed to provide a password whenever you need to access the files of the archive.
Method 2. Password Protect Thumb Drive Documents
You might choose to password-protect only separate folders on your flash drive and not a whole drive. If your content is a Word doc or some other Microsoft Office file, you can set a flash drive protected with a password for the folder inside M/s Word or the files associated with the Microsoft application.
To password protect a Word doc, open the folder in Ms Word and select ‘File’. On the ‘Info’ option, you’ll notice the option to ‘Protect Document’. Select that option and click ‘Encrypt with Password’. You can follow the method for other Ms office files.
Though, if your folder is not a Ms Office file, you can still password-protect the single folder on your flash drive using WINRAR. Just right-click your folder, choose ‘Add to archive’ and stick to the process for password protection using WINRAR mentioned above.
Method 3. Using Rohos Mini software to Encrypt a Part of the USB
Rohos Mini Drive is a software that you can utilize to make a secret password-protected folder of your files on your flash drive. Think of this secret container as an imaginary partition that secures a flash drive under a password. With this software, you can password-protect up to eight GB of data in your flash drive. Follow the steps underlined to set up a hidden portion on your flash drive using Rohos Mini.
Step 1 Download Rohos Mini
Open to the official website, download & install Rohos Mini on your desktop. It is for Windows users. Only eight GB of files can be password protected when you install the basic version of the software.
Step 2 Navigate to your USB drive
Once installed on your desktop, click on the Rohos Mini icon to run the program. A window will be displayed. Click ‘Encrypt USB drive’. A pop-up window will be displayed. Click on ‘Change’ and go down to select your flash drive.
Step 3 Enter a password
Once your flash drive has been identified by the program, two textboxes will be displayed. Enter a password into the secret partition in the text boxes displayed, then again enter the password to verify it. Select ‘Create a disk’ to start the USB encryption.
You’ll get a display popup once the password-protected partition has been successfully made and you can begin putting folders to the password-protected portion of your flash drive.
Rohos Mini is the best flash drive security tool that you can use to save & password-protect a part of your flash drive. It also provides a virtual keyword that you can utilize to put your secret password. In this way, you secure your password leaking to virus programs that can steal keywords.
Closing Words
The handiness of flash drives lets us easily store, share, and back up our crucial data. Though, the risk added with the use of flash drives is that our important files or data may go into the wrong heads or mistakenly get formatted or deleted. But not to worry, there is an end number of solutions given in this article to solve the problems of flash drive security. With software, you can even recover lost or formatted data of differential file formats from your flash drives. For making a password-protected USB drive, you can utilize BitLocker, Rohos mini drive or WINRAR to password protect a flash drive, Linux, Mac, or Windows 10.
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