Using Cruzer Sandisks on Mac - reformatting confusion

[evennewerbie]

So I have a fair number of pen drives (memory sticks) on which I put stuff from a Windows computer. Some of it dating back as far as 2010, But it seems to be mostly still readable.

Now I want to save them together on another pen drive that I access from my Mac. I do not have a Windows computer available at the moment. So I come across this thing that drives are formatted…

From my Mac computer I can read some of these Windows FAT 32 drives, the unencrypted ones. (people talk about encrypted and about password protected - are these really the same thing? I would say my drives password-protected).

I want to save some of them on a new memory stick - I’ll call it the ‘receiver’ I will use with my Mac and that is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

The reason for this format choice is that I want to password protect this, and apparently I can't do this on Mac with FAT 32, I have to use the Mac Extended. My entire receiver stick is at present password protected that way.

Most of the sticks whose contents I want to save are Cruzer Edge. One extra reason for transferring them is that I find these horribly complicated, difficult and confusing to use, but before I got the Mac they were the only ones I knew that have password protection, whereas now I can password protect an ornery Kingston with this Mac Extended.

So I dragged dropped contents of a couple of these Sandisk memory sticks contents across to my new receiver stick. For one of these transfers, taking I think about 10 minutes, it couldn't complete, and only about 1 GB out of 3.4 GB has been moved across. However I seem to be able to read what is on the Origin drive, an old SanDisk. I don't remember which format I had set up the receiving drive when I drag-dropped it.

Is this important? Do they have to be the same?

For the moment the problem that concerns me more is a another stick like it which is password-protected. I drag dropped that onto the receiver stick too, that took about an hour to complete. This contains about 5.6 GB. (So it's doubly password protected, are there any downsides to that?) I can't see what's in it yet. Get info doesn't tell me anything about format.

So my question is how do I proceed? I am dead scared of losing data. I think I may have done this on one old memory stick during the manipulations, hopefully most of the information is on another. And you are told reformatting risk loss of data, so back up. So how do I do that? Just drag-dropping contents of one stick into another (I have several empty ones) does it?

I guess I have to use this - Download for Mac (13MB) thing which is in here https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2399 , Don’t know this is up-to-date. I think this maybe is inside a sanDisk

Is there an order to do these things in? Should I first of all reformat a SanDisk, then drag it into the receiver, or do that in the opposite order, or should after reformatting open it first and drag the contents into the receiver, and then possibly re-pw-protect, or should I do what I started before, and drag the SanDisk into the target folder, then try to reformat it there?

Hope this is understandable, I'm quite confused about what to do.

My Mac is a 3" Retina Macbook, OS High Sierra 10.13.4

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

I have never used password protection or encryption with a USB flash drive. I would assume they have some similar traits. Password protection should only require a password to allow access to the files, which aren't stored with encryption. Encrypted drives should have a password which will decrypt the files on access on the fly. I believe that is the way they work.

The slow transfer sounds like the flash drives are USB 2.0, which can be VERY slow on the transfer compared to newer USB 3.0 sticks. I would create a folder on the Desktop of the MacBook, copy all of the files from the assorted drives, then copy all to the new "consolidation" flash drive at once. It can easily take a very long time to copy them from one flash drive to another at USB 2.0 speed.

It might be a good idea to contact SanDisk and the other manufactures directly to inquire about the encryption issue. They may have a good way to access the drives, especially since they were formatted and created using a Windows PC.

Hope that helps a bit,

C