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Showing posts from June, 2016

How to Encrypt Data on External Drives

It's not hard to lose a USB flash drive; it's even easier to steal one. If you're the victim of such a theft, panic is understandable. There could be work documents, private pictures, your kid's birthday party video, or amazing notes for a NaNoWriMo novel—anything—on that drive. It's unlikely to be the only copy—this is the age of online backup and sync, after all. But if you're crazy enough to trust your most important, irreplaceable data to a device that's even easier to misplace or forget than your keys, at least make sure that data is secure. What you'll need is software for encrypting the data, and that software has to be portable, in that it runs on any PC without installation, since it will likely run from the flash drive itself. Note, these solutions also work with any external hard drive, for the most part, plus your much-harder-to-steal internal hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Encryption Software The first choice