Encrypting USB flash and hard drives

JUST IN CASE YOU LOSE IT.

PLENTY OF PEOPLE still use USB hard and flash drives for backup and for carrying around files that are too large or sensitive to send over the internet. But as any sysadmin will tell you, such drives are a massive security risk. Flash drives in particular are very easy to lose (or steal), and when that happens you may find that an awful lot of personal data is suddenly out there in the wild. And unlike phones, they aren’t typically encrypted or secured by default, which means that anybody who gets their hands on it basically has access to all your stuff.

Thankfully, you can encrypt the data on the drive if you choose – it just requires the right app and a few minutes.

For a start, if you use such a drive as a backup target for backup software, make sure that the option to encrypt the backup is switched on. Most packaged backup solutions have this option.

But even better is to go for a whole-drive backup solution. That ensures that everything you put on the drive is encrypted. This has a downside – you’ll only be able to use the drive on platforms where there is a decryption app available (so, for example, if you plug it into a PlayStation or Smart TV, the drive will be unusable).

So what’s the best tool for the job?

BITLOCKER

If you have Windows 10 Professional, Enterprise or Education you can use BitLocker, which is a perfectly solid tool for encrypting external drives. You can use it to password protect drives or files and decrypt them on Windows PCs. Although Microsoft hasn’t released an official decryption tool to let you read files on Macs, there are third party tools like M3 BitLocker Loader for Mac ( www.

m3datarecovery.com/mac-bitlocker/). On

Linux, there is Dislocker ( github.com/ Aorimn/dislocker/tree/develop).

We’re going to assume here that most people are running Windows 10 Home, so we won’t go into depth on BitLocker in this issue of TechLife. The quick version is that you need to right click on the drive in File Explorer and select Turn on BitLocker.

Windows will give you a set of options: to use a smart card or password; how to back up the recovery key in case you forget your password; whether to encrypt just files or the full drive; whether to use the new encryption method or the backwards compatible one.

Once you’ve done that, the drive will be encrypted. When you take it to another PC and try to open it, you’ll be asked to enter the password before it can be used.

VERACRYPT

For reasons passing understanding, BitLocker is still not available on Windows 10 Home.

Pick the second option.

BitLocker gives you the option just to encrypt existing files, or to fully encrypt the drive. We suggest the latter, especially for hard disks where deleted files might still be recoverable.

The starting screen for VeraCrypt.

Look for the encryption option in your backup software. Shown: CloudBerry Backup.