How to password-protect an external hard drive or an external USB drive

Question

I've got:

• 1 external 120GB USB hard drive (TrekStor DataStation pocket capa)
• 2 16GB external USB drives (EMTEC)
• 2 32GB or 64BG external USB devices (SanDisk, one is USN 2.0 and the other USB 3.0, I think although I must find out who else may have had a hold of these).
• 1.6GB microSDC card to boots internal phone memory

Anyways, my question is, it bothers me that someone of the people living with you could simply unplug this, stick it where they wanted to, and read all of your data.

I'm running Windows 7 bare-boses Home-Premium. I've heared solutions to this probem exist. I would like to know how to:

1. Set up a password manager on any device (perhaps having a public partition and a private partition with my files on it, so that whenever someone asked for a file on a private partition you'd have to input it to format the data).

2. Move the data off the disk, repartition it so that it is a secure encrypting filesystem, and mover it back there.

...

3. When someone steals my phone and plugs into a computer's USB port, they can see all my files, and I find this disturbing. How can I prevent this?

Solution

What you're looking for is the ability to encrypt your drive, there are several solutions out there, but this link has solutions for both Windows and OSX.

Bitlocker is built into Windows since Vista, and will encrypt the entire disk. The OSX Disk Encryption does the same thing in a similar way.

Since you are running Home Premium you can't use Bitlocker because it is for Windows 7 Pro and above, so you could use an Open Source alternative such as DiskCryptor or Veracrypt.

There are also encryption solutions that will create a container to encrypt some files, but not the entire disk, Veracrypt has this ability, if that's something you're looking for.

For your specific questions, there are already lots of open source guides on how to encrypt a disk, so a simple Google search will provide you those answers. For Veracrypt, here is a beginners guide on how to use it.

Comments

[Darius]

About your #3, if someone got physical access to your device (PC/Phone/etc) consider its gone, and any data is as good as compromised. If you want to "secure" it, maybe someone else have an answer. You can remote wipe them. Depends on your phone, iOS has "Find my Phone" and can do remote wipe. Android also have Android Device Manager to allow remote wipe.

[Adam]

@Darius If you have passcode on your iOS or Android device, then you cannot access the files. I believe (and could be wrong) that iOS needs to be jailbroken to access files over USB, and Android you have to unlock your device to enable USB access. If the intruder does not have your passcode, they can't get your files. There are still ways around this, though, but if you encryption on your phone, supported by both Android and iOS, then the files are not accessible without the decryption key.