By Sophia | Last Updated
In daily life and work, USB flash drive is a widely used device. How to avoid the important data files in USB flash drive from being viewed and spread? The best way is to set a password for your USB flash drive. Now, without wasting too much of your time, this article will introduce 5 ways on how to secure files on a USB drive with passwords. These methods include single file encryption and whole USB flash drive encryption.
Step 1: Insert the USB drive you want to encrypt into the USB port of your computer, find the corresponding USB drive in "This PC", right-click and select the "Turn on BitLocker" option.
Step 2: Follow the wizard prompts and on the "Choose how you want to unlock this drive" tab, check the "use a password to unlock the drive" item and enter and re-enter your password and click "Next".
Step 3: Select how to backup your recovery key > Save to a file, then click "Next".
Step 4: Start encrypting the USB flash drive and finish the encryption.
Advantage: Effective protection against external software attacks with High encryption security;no extra cost.
Disadvantages: The encryption method is not flexible enough,the encrypted files can't be hidden;and restricted by the windows environment,Windows Home Edition does not work with BitLocker.
iSunshare SafeUSB Genius, a professional USB flash drive encryption software ,which is easy to operate even for novices, now has millions of users. It can password protect USB drives securely and quickly.
Step 1: Install and enable iSunshare SafeUSB Genius, insert your USB drive and it will automatically recognize and select your USB drive.
Step 2: Click on the "Encrypt" button and come to the next step, set and confirm your password, click on the "Encrypt" button again.
Step 3: The USB flash drive will be encrypted within minutes, after the encryption is completed, a message will be displayed indicating that it has been successfully encrypted, click "OK"，and your USB drive is securely encrypted in just 3 steps.
Advantage: Professional USB flash drive encryption software that can encrypt, lock, unlock and decrypt your USB drive with a higher security factor; Support to create virtual disk,and work with any version of Windows computer.
Disadvantages: You need to pay to use it, but you can upgrade it for free for life after purchase. Compared to other software: lower cost, longer guarantee.
7-Zip is one of the easiest to use decompression software that can both decompress files and create encrypted files while compressing them.
Step 1: After making sure your computer has 7-Zip installed, right-click on a file or entire folder on your USB drive and select "7-ZIP">" Add to Archive".
Step 2: In the " Add to Archive" screen, select the storage location of the encrypted files, then enter and confirm the password, click " OK", and your files are encrypted.
Advantage: Completely free for both individual users and corporate users.
Disadvantages: The security is very low.For example, if someone has ZIP Password Genius or other password tool,they can easily decrypt your compressed files in seconds even without the password, so it's not suitable for files with high confidentiality.
As we all know, WINRAR is a very good file compression software, however, we always ignore its file encryption function.
Step 1: Place the files that need to be password-protected into a folder, right-click the folder, and select "WINRAR" > "Add to archive… "
Step 2: In the next interface, check "Create SFX archive", click "Set Password", then enter the encryption password and click "OK" button.
Finally, you need to delete the original folder without encryption. When users try to access the encrypted decompressed files in the USB drive, then need to enter the decompression password to access them properly.
Advantage: the security of files encrypted with WINRAR will be higher than that of 7 - zip, and it is free to users.
Disadvantages: After you finish encrypting your files, you need to delete the original folder without encryption, and then double check to make sure the unencrypted copy is located somewhere you can find, if you neglect this step, your files will still be at risk of being compromised. And professional RAR Password Recovery Software can recover passwords easily，no matter how complex the password is and what encryption algorithm is used.
To password protect the files on the USB drive, you can use iSunshare SafeFile Genius as well, which is a file encryption tool that can help you encrypt and decrypt files and folders on local disk or USB drives. With this tool, you are only several steps to encrypt the files on the USB drive. Here's how:
Step 1: Download and install iSunshare SafeFile Genius on your computer, and launch it.
Step 2: Next, click on the Encrypt button.
Step 3: Then select files you would like to encrypt, and click on Next to continue.
Step 4: After that, set passwords to the files, and click on Encrypt to start encrypting.
Step 5: In this step, just wait for the files on USB drive to be encrypted.
Step 6: After a while, iSunshare SafeFiles Genius successfully encrypted files on the USB drive.
If you want to quickly set a password to a selected number of documents, you can use Microsoft Office's document encryption feature，the example is for word.
Step 1: "click info" > " choose protect document">" Encrypt with password".
Step 2: Enter your password in the interface and confirm it to complete the above steps and the file encryption is successful. Note: Don't forget the password you set for the document.
Advantage: It can encrypt single file quickly without installing other software.
Disadvantages: If there are many files to be encrypted, it is difficult to manage the password of each file，once the password is lost, the files cannot be recovered; it cannot encrypt all the files in the USB flash drive, and there is still a great security threat.
Conclusion:
These are the 5 ways of how to secure files on a USB drive shared today. Which method are you going to use to secure your USB drive files? Welcome to discuss in the comment section.
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