Secure Storage Solutions: BitLocker to Go and MacOS Encryption

Portable storage has come a long way in the last several years. Today, it’s easy to carry around 64GB of storage and more in a tiny USB
drive and 4TB and more in a larger — but still reasonably sized —
portable hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD). That’s a
great benefit for anyone with a portable machine that’s low on space,
for photographers and videographers who need a place to store their
work, or really just about anyone else who needs to transfer work from
one machine or user to another.To get more featured articles, you can visit shine news official website.
But having access to so much portable storage has a dark side. The more information we can save in standalone devices that are easier to
misplace and leave behind, the more we need to worry about nefarious
parties gaining access to our personal data. That’s where secure storage
comes in, which uses several different methods to encrypt the contents
of our external storage devices to make it harder to access.
There are two main methods used to secure storage devices. First is software, where either an application or an operating system feature is
used to encrypt the data on a device. The other is hardware, where an
external storage device incorporates its own encryption chip and some
method for entering the encryption key to unlock the data.
This article will provide an introduction to two of the most popular software solutions for securing your portable storage devices. For a
look at hardware solutions, read our in-depth look at iStorage security
drives.Windows includes support for encrypting drives via the BitLocker
full disk encryption system that first made its debut in Windows Vista.
You can use BitLocker to encrypt external drives just as easily as
internal drives, and then securely access them on any machine running
Windows Vista or later. Note that if you want to use BitLocker with
older Windows XP or Vista systems (both of which require the BitLocker
To Go Reader app), then the drive must be formatted as FAT16, FAT32, or
exFAT. You can use NTFS drives with Windows 7 systems and later.
A dialog will open asking you to decide how to unlock the drive once
it’s been encrypted. Choose to enter a password to unlock the drive to
allow you to use it on other PCs. Note that you ned to use a password
that’s at least eight characters and that has some mix of upper and
lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters – you’ll get an error
if you don’t create a strong enough password.