External Drive Security

I am posting this on Behalf of another Mac friend. He just bought an external HD, a Western Digital 250 GB Drive. He wants to know if he can enable some security on it so no one can plug in to the drive and take or edit his files. Thanks in advance,

Searay

There's plenty of software out there that'll do the trick... both commercial and freeware... and most likely something could be done in Terminal also... but a solution for someone who doesn't want to buy any additional software or get into Terminal is to use disk images. You can launch Disk Utility and click on "New Image." It'll ask where you want to save this new image, and you can the external hard drive. Give it a name, assign it a size (you could go with one or two large disk images, or several smaller ones depending on need), and then under "Size" areyour encryption options "none" or "AES-128". Choose "AES-128" and click "Create." It'll ask what you want your password to be, and then the disk image will mount... files and folders can then be added to that mounted disk image, and then the mounted disk image can be "ejected" and you' be left with an encrypted .dmg file... To retrieve data from it you'd just double click the .dmg file, give it the password (you can save the password in your keychain on your own computer if the main concern is the drive being stolen or "borrowed" by the wrong people, so you don't always have to tell it the password, but it's more secure to not save it in your keychain), and the disk image mounts... I'm sure this isn't the slickest way to go about it, and may not even be the best, but it can give quick and fairly easy protection, and can be used either for short term while shareware or commercial software solutions are considered, or long term for as long as you (or your friend) are happy with it...

Thats a good way, thats how the Mac implements security (FileVault).

The only downside is that if the data gets a bit corrupt or you accidentally throw something a way, it's normally very hard to recover that data.

Pick a password that you won't forget, because if you lose it, you'll lose your data !

What secret stuff has he got ? ;-)

regards

Ric

Hey Zeyhra and Ric! Thanks for the info!!

I will tell my friend these steps. Ric, my friend is in the engineering program here at my school. He is going to be placing engineering projects in there that if someone got a peek at, it could compromise his projects and could lead to other bad things. He has filevault enabled already but wants the same security on the external drive.

Searay

No problem, Zeyhra did all the work ;-)

I'm always intrigued as to what people want to encyrpt...it's normally to prevent a sibling getting to nosey !

regards

Ric

Well in a way, it's to help prevent other engineers from getting access to "top secret" stuff. Same principle.

Hope it works for your friend Searay... It's most likely the method I'd use if I needed to store something I didn't want others to get in to... and now that I'm thinking about it, it gives me an idea for more securely backing up some of our critical data at the office!

There you go Zeyhra! That sounds like a good plan! I will be calling my friend tomorrow night to give him the procedure.

Searay