Click the “OK” to continue with the next steps. Step 4: Once the drive has been formatted successfully the following message will popup. Ensure that the selected drop-down option under File System is NTFS, and then click Start. Step 2: The above step will completely erase all the data on your external drive. Step 1: Open the Windows Explorer and right-click on your external hard drive. Go through the following steps to encrypt an external hard drive in Windows using BitLocker. Encrypting External Hard drive in Windows For instance, you can use BitLocker for Windows, FileVault for Mac, and LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format) for Linux to encrypt your USB drives.
Most modern operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux have built-in tools for encrypting your external hard drives or USB peripherals. In this segment, I’ll show you how to encrypt your external drive. Ways to Encrypt Your External Hard Drive or USB This article will learn how to encrypt your hard drive / USB using various methods.Īlso check out our article on how to encrypt your internet traffic for further security tips. According to them, you will have to pay costly fines if your data is not encrypted.Įven if these regulations do not constrain you, it is still vital to encrypt your external storage devices to prevent data breaches that could cause severe damage to your company. On the other hand, some data protection regulations like the GDPR or HIPAA are mandatory to follow if you are a business or a company user. Therefore, you should encrypt them, especially when they contain sensitive or personally identifiable information. If they are not encrypted, there is a high risk of exposing your sensitive information to unauthorized people in such situations. While external hard drives and USB sticks are beneficial when transferring or viewing data from one machine to another, they may be lost. Why should you encrypt your external hard drive or USB? It is a symmetric block cipher, which means that the same key is used for disk encryption and decryption. The objective of AES is to provide a specification for electronic data encryption. It was established by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the widely used global standards for encryption. The primary purpose of encrypting external hard drives is to protect their data from unauthorized persons. It provides security to your external hard drive against hackers and other online threats. This can be done by using software or some other way.Īfter disk encryption, the data on the external hard drive cannot be accessed by anyone who doesn’t own the relevant key or password.
How does Encrypting an External Hard Drive or USB WorkĮncrypting an external hard drive means making it secure by encrypting the data stored using sophisticated mathematical functions.
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