USB flash drives are the most convenient portable tools for work, but because of the possibility of losing them, it is necessary to protect documents with a password
USB flash drives are one of the most used tools by those who, for work or study, must always carry with them important documents and files. However, portability also represents a danger for these devices, which can be easily stolen or lost. Setting a password can be a good way to increase security.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to set a single password to protect the entire USB flash drive, unlike smartphones and computers. Unless we bought a drive protected with hardware-level encryption. To prevent our most important data from falling into the wrong hands, we can still set a password for individual files. Also in this case we will always have to turn to encryption. If we are not very familiar with computers, we can save files with a password before putting them on the drive. Several programs, such as Word or Excel, allow you to set an access code to documents when saving them.
Set a password in the file
In Word, setting a password to protect a document is quite simple. Just click on File and then select the Protect Document item. In the pop-up menu click on Encrypt with Password. At this point all we have to do is enter the code and confirm the operation. What if we want to save a password-protected PDF file on the flash drive? Simple, just use a program designed to protect PDF documents. Among the best ones are PDFTK Builder.
Protect a part of the data
One of the main problems with creating a password for a single document on the USB stick is the administrator rights. That is, these files can only be opened on certain computers. This creates a great inconvenience for those who have to use the documents on several PCs. For this reason, if you often use USB flash drives for work and want to protect your information, instead of using a password on every single file, it is better to use a program like Rohos Mini Drive. The software allows you to protect with encryption up to 2GB saved on a single flash drive. The tool in question uses automatic on-the-fly encryption with AES 256 bit. The software installed on the USB flash drive already has the encryption so we won’t need administrator permissions of the computer where we’re going to insert it. To protect our data just click on Encrypt USB drive from the Rohos Mini Drive home screen. Then we will have to select our USB drive and put a password. Then just click on Create Disk and you’re done. This way you’ll have a password protected 2GB container on the drive.
Encrypt USB Drive
You can also encrypt the entire drive. Thanks to a program like VeraCrypt. Even with this solution we will need administrator rights. And this tool also uses AES 256-bit encryption on-the-fly, as well as Rohos Mini Drive. To start using it we have to install VeraCrypt directly on our flash drive. Once we have downloaded VeraCrypt to the USB stick we launch the application and click on the Create Volume item. To encrypt the entire USB drive we select Encrypt a non-system partition/drive and then click Next. In the next step we have to choose whether to create a classic or a hidden container. We select the hidden one and choose a password. To complete this process you will need to format the entire USB drive first.