How to Make Your USB Flash Drive Password Protected

Your USB sticks are those very small though important piece of hardware that contains your very useful informaion. These are portable, faster and comfortable ways to transfer a data.

As it may sometimes contain confedential information, you might want to password-protect your USB flash drives. But, your USB flash drive do not have the option to add password, unless you buy a expensive secure flash drive with hardware encryption.

Certain programs like MS-Word, MS-Excel, etc. will let you to password-protect any document. For this click on the MS-Office logo available at top-left and navigate to prepare > encrypt document. It will allow you to add password-protection to any document.

If there is any file (or files) other than those of MS-Office that you want to encrypt inside your USB pen drive then, the easiest way is to compress all files and folders in either .zip or .rar format using WinRAR and use their provided options to password-protect your compressed files.

The above method doesn’t required any special encryption software to encrypt the content inside your USB flash stick. However, if you are looking for some easy and faster ways to add password-protection to your USB stick then here are some freeware that will let you to password-protect your USB flash drive.

1. Rohos Mini Drive

Rohos Mini Drive is a small software to password-protect your USB flash drive. This software works on-the-fly so you don’t required to have this software installed on any system. Just install the software inside your USB drive and it’ll be password-protected.

2. USB SafeGuard

USB Safeguard is a portable software program to encrypt and protect data with a  password on your removable pen drive  using the AES 256 bits encryption. Just download this small program and copy it to your USB drive. Now, run it from your pen drive. USB SafeGuard will ask you to enter setup password after that, your pen drive will be password protected. Whenever you connect your pen drive, it will ask password to unlock its content.

3. Master Voyager

Master Voyager is another portable app built to password protect your CD/DVD and USB Flash Memory. It sits inside your USB Drive, CDs/DVDs and serve you password-protection by creating protected areas where you can put your confedential files and implement password-protection. Master Voyager utilizes strong AES encryption technology to serve protection.

4. SafeHouse Explorer

SafeHouse Explorer is stand-alone application that lets you to hide, lock and encrypt documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos and other files. The software is also capable to implement security to your USB Sticks like pen drives, memory cards and even iPods. It uses strong 256-bit Twofish advanced encryption ensures your total protection.  SafeHouse Explorer can be run directly from USB devices without prior software installation on system.