Memory sticks are one of the great inventions of the IT area, due to their main advantage – portability. It allows the owner to carry information from one place to another or have it on him or her at any time. Their storage capacity increased permanently once the technological breakthroughs took place and one could now store tens of gigabytes on them. However, the downside of this great thing, the portability, is the fact that, in case one lost such a memory stick, the information stored on it would become easily available for anybody else that finds that stick. It’s true, that not all the information is private and confidential, but should this be the case, the situation could become very complicated.
In order to avoid such happenings, it proves itself to be very useful to encrypt the flash drives, using different methods. For example, if you own a Windows 7 Premium or Ultimate licensed operating system, you can use the encryption built in functions to do that. Otherwise, there is other software available for getting from the internet that runs on older Windows versions or other operating systems, as well.
We mentioned about the Windows 7 features to encrypt flash drives content. This is called Bit-locker To Go. It’s very easy to use this Windows function to encrypt all the contents and set a pass code without which nothing on the stick can be viewed or accessed. The disadvantage of using Bit-locker To Go is that this makes the memory stick with the encrypted contents unavailable for machines with other operating systems than Windows, while the older versions of Windows than Windows 7 can only read, but not modify contents (read-only feature).
Other software that can be used for encryption are True Crypt and Remora USB Disk Guard, which come with no-install version or installation directly on the memory stick.
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