The very portable size that make USB drive, a first choice for data storage and data transfer need also makes it prone to lost and theft easily. A USB drive lost or theft along with the data (personal, confidential, sensitive data or all at the same time) stored within may also leads to (potential misuse of data by person who found it or intentionally theft it).

We cannot stop using USB drive for this or any reason but what we can do is at least put a password protection that ensures blocking a potential misuse of data after loss or theft of USB drive.

There are a number of free and paid tools for USB password protection. I prefer to use the “BitLocker” that comes with windows vista and above(on selected editions).

BitLocker is a drive encryption tool that works with simple volume that means a partition or complete hard disk that is assigned with a drive letter(as “c:”). It can encrypt the whole drive and give provision to set up the password required to access the drive.

How to set up a password for USB drive in windows vista/7.

Check if your copy of windows edition supports BitLocker.

List of windows edition that supports BitLocker

  1. Windows Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate)
  2. Windows 7 (Enterprise and Ultimate)
  3. Windows 8 ( Enterprise and Pro)
  4. windows 8.1 (Enterprise and pro)
  5. Windows 10 (Enterprise and Pro)

An administrator privilege is required to run BitLocker.

Type “BitLocker” in the start menu. Or go to Control Panel > System and Security > BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Click on the “Manage BitLocker” and now you can see “turn on BitLocker” in front of available drives (categorized as “Hard disk drives” for installed disk drives and “BitLocker to go” for external hard disk or USB drive).

Now click on “turn on BitLocker” beside your selected drive.

Alternatively, right click on USB drive (in my computer) and go to “turn on BitLocker”.

Then the BitLocker will start and will ask you how you want to unlock the drive. Select “Use a password to unlock the drive” and type your password.

Then click “save the recovery key to file: option and save it to any secure location( as this is only chance to access your encrypted drive in case of password lost). Then click “next” and “start encrypting” option. It would take some time, depending upon the size of your drive.

Once you are done, Every time you connect your drive to computer, a popup window will appear asking for password in order to access your drive. On same window there is also a option “automatically unlock on this computer from now on” in order to give permanent access to particular computer.

The encrypted USB drive will work only on windows based computers and cannot be used on Mac or Linux computers (in such case, you may need addition tools to read/write “BitLocker encrypted drive”).