So you have some files that you don’t want anyone accessing. Your Mac is already pretty secure, but what happens when you want to encrypt a USB drive?
This is where disk encryption comes in. Basically, it’ll keep your USB thumb drive safe by encrypting the data on it and requiring a password to access it.
You may not know this, but macOS actually has a few built-in USB encryption features baked into its software — letting you encrypt and decrypt USB drives and other storage media on the fly. Here’s how to use them.
- Sep 26, 2018 Connect the MacOS Mojave installer USB drive to the Mac you want to boot it from Reboot (or start up) the Mac and immediately hold down the OPTION key on the keyboard At the boot selector screen, choose “Install macOS Mojave” from the startup options.
- Dec 16, 2018 Attach the USB flash drive to your Mac and locate its disk icon on your desktop, in a Finder window, or in the Finder sidebar, then right-click (or Ctrl-click) it and select Encrypt “USB stick name” from the contextual menu.
Jan 15, 2019 As part of working with FileVault on macOS Mojave, it may be necessary to decrypt an encrypted boot drive in order to fix a problem. On Mojave all boot volumes will use Apple File System (APFS), so to unlock or decrypt an encrypted boot drive from the.
Contents
- 2 Leverage Disk Utility on macOS to encrypt USB drives
- 3 USB drive encryption that works with Windows PC and Mac
Related:
Use Finder to encrypt USB drives on MacBook
As of macOS Mojave, you can easily encrypt and decrypt generic mass storage devices on-the-go using Finder.
This uses XTS-AES encryption, which is the same type of encryption that the macOS FileVault 2 system uses. Keep in mind that using Finder to encrypt a thumb drive will restrict its usage to macOS. Universal print driver hp mac os x. You won’t be able to access the data on it on a Windows or Linux machine.
- Plug your thumb drive or generic mass storage medium into your Mac.
- Open Finder.
- Right-click the thumb drive in the left sidebar. It’ll be under Locations
- Click on Encrypt “(Name of mass storage drive)”. If you don’t see this option, skip to the note below.
- Finder will now prompt you to enter a password and a hint. This will be used to access the data on your thumb drive — so don’t lose it!
- When all of that is typed in, click Encrypt Disk.
Finder will then encrypt your thumb drive. Depending on how much data is on it, the process could take a while.
To access the contents of the thumb drive, you’ll need to input the password that you created earlier. There’s absolutely no way to reset this password, so make sure you write it down in a safe place or use a password management platform.
Note: If you don’t see the Encrypt option when you right-click the thumb drive, it means that the USB storage device isn’t in the proper format to use the baked-in macOS encryption. You’ll need to use the following method to encrypt your drive.
Leverage Disk Utility on macOS to encrypt USB drives
As we covered, if you don’t see the Encrypt option, it means that your USB device hasn’t been formatted with a GUID partition map — which is a requirement for Finder encryption.
To get the encryption option, you’ll need to erase your thumb drive and then encrypt it in Disk Utility. Of course, make sure to copy all of the data from your USB drive to a safe location. Somewhere on your Mac’s internal disk is a good option. Once your data is somewhere safe, you can go about actually erasing and encrypting your flash drive.
- Open Disk Utility. You’ll find it in Applications —> Utilities in Finder or in the Utilities folder in Launchpad.
- In the top Disk Utility menu bar, click on View.
- Now, select the Show All Devices option to check it if it isn’t ticked already.
- Select your USB thumb drive from the left-hand sidebar. Make sure to click on the top option, not any subsequent device names listed underneath it.
- Click the Erase option in the Disk Utility toolbar.
- Give your USB thumb drive a new name.
- Under the Scheme menu, make sure you have GUID Partition Map selected. You’ll need to change this before selecting the Format. Which brings us to…
- Under the Format menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).
From here, you’ll be prompted to input a password and hint again. Like with the Finder method, you’ll want to keep this in a safe place because there’s no option to reset it. When you’re done, click on Erase.
When all is said and done, copy all of the data that was originally on your thumb drive back from the safe location. Once it’s on the drive, it’ll automatically be encrypted and password-protected.
Alternate method
Alternatively, you can also set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the Scheme to GUID Partition Map. This won’t encrypt your USB drive within Disk Utility, but it will allow you to encrypt it using the simple Finder method.
This may be the preferred option if you don’t want to commit to an encrypted drive and password immediately, but you want to be able to encrypt your storage medium on-the-go later on using Finder.
USB drive encryption that works with Windows PC and Mac
The above two methods will make sure that your data is safe and protected no matter what happens. Install mac os on flash drive. But, of course, they’ll only work on macOS devices. This is because the Mac OS Extended format, true to its name, is only compatible with Apple computers.
If you need to access your data from a Windows PC or a Linux machine, then you’ll want to opt for a third-party encryption solution. A couple of high-quality options are DiskCryptor and VeraCrypt.
They’re both completely free to use and open source, but they don’t skimp on the encryption quality. In fact, both apps offer a variety of different encryption options — such as AES, Twofish and Serpent.
You can’t go wrong with either. They’re both also fairly simple to use, so we’ll refrain from offering any in-depth instructions on how to encrypt using them. Just make sure to encrypt your drive using a Windows- or Linux-compatible format like FAT32.
For more information, you can visit their respective websites.
If you use USB drives to carry information, it is always a good idea to encrypt the drive so that your privacy and security is protected in the case you lose the drive. This is particularly true if you use thumb drives to store personal photos or contract documents etc. https://everup924.weebly.com/blog/increase-hard-drive-size-vmware-mac-os. We hope that you find these tips helpful. Please let us know in the comments below if you have any questions for us.
Mike is a freelance journalist from San Diego, California.
While he primarily covers Apple and consumer technology, he has past experience writing about public safety, local government, and education for a variety of publications.
He’s worn quite a few hats in the journalism field, including writer, editor, and news designer.
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USB flash drive is very convenient because of the portability factor, but they can often pose a security risk. If you lose your USB drive, there's no telling into whose hands your data might fall. The best way to keep your data safe is to encrypt your USB with a strong password that is unique and hard to hack. This article shows you various ways to secure your information by encrypting USB on Mac.
Encrypt USB Drive on Mac with Disk Utility
The built-in Disk Utility app on Mac will also be able to encrypt USB for you, but you'll need to erase and format it before you can apply password protection. That also means you need to take a backup of whatever is in the drive before encrypting it. You can add the data again once the drive has been prepared. Here are the steps to follow:
Step 1: Insert your USB drive into the computer and launch Disk Utility from Applications >Utilities.
Step 2: In the left sidebar, make sure Show All Devices is ticked. Then select your drive from the sidebar. Don't select the volume name that appears below it.
Step 3: At the top of the Disk Utility window, click on Erase and add a name for your USB drive in the popup window. Select GUID Partition Map in the dropdown for Scheme, and then choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) as Format option.
Please note, the password option won't pop up if you chose other partition scheme and format.
Step 4: Once you hit Erase, you'll be asked to enter a password twice, as well as a password hint that you can type in. Select Choose, and then Erase again to format and encrypt the drive.
Step 5: Wait 2-3 minutes and the USB is fully encrypted by password. Next time you insert the USB on Mac, a small window pops up asking for password to unlock the device.
The steps are simple but have two major pitfalls basically. First, the drive must be eased so the data on the USB will be deleted. You have to backup and copy data to it after encryption, which takes a lot of time if the volume is large enough. Another mojar disavantage is that the drive can not be used on Windows or Linux.
Encrypt USB Drive on Mac with FileVault
You can encrypt an external volume by applying a password using FileVault, the built-in feature in macOS. This offers secure AES protection for your data, but there are a couple of things to remember. First of all, any external or internal drive encrypted with FileVault will not be accessible in a Windows computer even if you know the password. Second, once you configure the password, you won't be able to change it. Nevertheless, this method is probably the easiest way to encrypt an external drive like a USB flash drive. Let's see how to go about it.
Step 1: Insert your USB drive into the Mac and open a Finder window.
Step 2: When you see your removable disk in the left panel, right-click it and select Encrypt from the contextual menu.
Step 3: In the FileVault window, you can set a password by typing it in twice, as well as set a password hint in case you forget it.
Step 4: Once you confirm the password and hint, the drive will be encrypted, and only that password can open it. Also, you can only unlock it on a Mac, as mentioned earlier.
To use this drive, just plug it into your computer and enter the password when prompted to do so. You can then keep working with files in the drive, and the encryption will happen automatically on all data and files that are added to it. Just unplug it when you're done.
There are clearly some disadvantages with this method. Apart from not being able to unlock it in Windows and not being able to change the password, if the drive is not formatted to the GUID partition style, you may not see the Encrypt option in Finder when you right-click the drive. As an alternative, you can use a third-party encryption tool that will allow you to unlock it from any machine as long as you know the password. This is obviously more convenient if you're going to be using the drive with multiple computers.
Password Protect USB Drive on Mac with VeraCrypt
You can also consider using a third-party encryption tool like VeraCrypt, but the process is complicated and it requires another utility called OSXFUSE, after which you need to download and install VeraCrypt, create a hidden volume and then move your data to it once it's set up.
Since this is not meant for first-time users, the better way would be to either use the Finder feature (FileVault) or the Mac app (Disk Utility.) https://everup924.weebly.com/blog/reinstall-mac-os-x-on-new-hard-drive.
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