USB Portable storage for Mac?

[Groundhog66]

I have a Ti Sandisk Cruzer 2MB flash drive, but I cannot password protect it with my Mac's. Does anyone make one that is more Mac friendly, not much good if you cannot protect your data.

Tim

 

[Mednanu]

I have a Ti Sandisk Cruzer 2MB flash drive, but I cannot password protect it with my Mac's. Does anyone make one that is more Mac friendly, not much good if you cannot protect your data.

Well, it depends how you want to use that encryption. Are you planning on using the encryption just on your Macs ( and any UNIX machine ), or do you want to be able to use the encryption features interchangeably between OSX & Windows ? Many of those drives do have built-in utilities for use on Mac OS as well as windows, but I generally don't trust them, as most don't actually encrypt the data. Many of them simply have a chip programmed as a 'gateway' between the actual flash module and the USB plug on the drive. All one has to do is gain physical access to the drive, bypass that chip ( easily done on most devices ) and the data is totally in plain text. Not too secure as far as I'm concerned.

If you want actual 'data-encryption', not just a password protected gatekeeper chip, you can protect it using Disk Utility. The only kicker is, encrypting it with Disk Util will relegate those encryption features to being used solely on Mac OS & Unix. Let me know if you're still interested and I can walk you through a few simple steps on how to do it.

 

[LukeA]

You could create a password-protected disk image on the drive.

 

[James S]

yea, the marketspeak on those sounds like a good idea, the built in encryption, but I dont trust it either.

If you dont need to be able to open the disk image on windows then it's easy.

First I'd open the disk utility and reformat the drive to HFS+ with journaling.

Then use disk utility to create a new disk image (new from file menu) change the size to custom or pick a size that is just a few meg smaller than the entire capacity of the disk. Then select 128bit encryption or higher if the newer versions support it. Then create it on the thumb drive. It will ask you for the password.

Now if anybody else finds your drive there is just a single really big but entirely compressed file on it. But if you double click that no the mac you can enter the password (or not if you store it in your keychain) and it will mount the encrypted volume for you to copy stuff too.

It is an extra step each time, mounting the drive, double clicking the single file to mount the second image. But it's very secure and safe and reliable without relying on hacking the disk drivers to support some other encryption.

I carry a very tiny 2 gig usb drive on my keychain that I keep the latest source code I"m working on all the time with me just in case. And I do exactly what I described. Works terrific.