Hi,
I need to buy a portable hard drive for my work stuff.
Can someone please suggest the best way to password protect it.
I am thinking of using bitlocker but open to suggestions. Thanks
Portable Hard Drive and Password Protection Options
vegemite2008 on 11/09/2022 - 22:36
Comments
I will use SSD.
Veracrypt. Under no circumstances would I trust a free utility that comes with a hard drive.
It's not a free utility if you paid for the hard drive.
Veracrypt on the other hand, is literally a free utility!
I don't see the problem using what the manufacturer supplies. It's in their interest for the utility to work.
Veracrypt is open source, has been around for ages and has been independently security audited. That is not the same thing as 'free'.
The software that came with a HD is either crapware or something cooked up in house.
* If it is crapware, the software companies that made it paid to be on the hard drive in the drive in the hopes that it will lead to future sales of the full version
* If it is in-house software it is highly unlikely that it has any rigorous security testing
In either case it's about marketing to put on a box to make a sale and their is no incentives in either case to provide a rigorous and robust security product.On top of that, Veracrypt actually uses it's own low level hardware drivers that actually perform better than what is built into windows, meaning you not only don't get a performance penalty on modern hardware, but your encrypted drive will actually perform better than a native file system.
The hard drive you're buying is literally "cooked up in-house" by the manufacturer. "Cooked up in house" does not mean poor quality.
Open source is not a magic assurance of quality. I'm sure VeraCrypt is fine, but unless audits are done often they become out of date. There's no such thing as a green tick for life.
VeraCrypt was forked from a predecessor that actually did have security trouble. I'm sure there were people who said "TrueCrypt is awesome, it's open source". Doesn't mean VeraCrypt inherited those issues, but it shows open source doesn't mean "without issue". All good. Each to their own!
I just rename all my files.
topsecret0001.txt
topsecret0002.txt
topsecret0003.txthas worked well thus far…
Open notepad, type:
ren *.jpg *.txt
Save it in the prawn folder as XXX.txt, then rename the extension as XXX.bat
Now double click that bat file.
All prawn & other octopussee files are now secured.
Cryptomator works well for me. Cross platform too.
keen to know too. I need one that has partitions for both Windows and one for mac. prefer a solution that doesn't need to format the whole thing
If you already have Windows Pro then Bitlocker is the simplest option.
I heard that there is a really nice option, it encrypts your data so well and its a paid version. You need to send bitcoin to a specific address to and then they send the code to decrypt it.
Is that the bitcoin exchange in Nigeria?
are you going to be travelling around a lot? if so, an SSD will be a better option. hard drives are very vulnerable to any kind of drop or sharp movement, as they have moving parts inside, whereas SSDs don't have moving parts inside. iirc the samsung SSD i bought came with its own software which allowed you to put a password on it.
this appears to be an updated model of the version i have.