HOW TO ENCRYPT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE?
- How To Encrypt Your Backup Drive For Mac Os
- Seagate Backup Drive
- How To Encrypt Your Backup Drive For Mac Computer
Go to Control Panel BitLocker Drive Encryption. Click 'Turn on BitLocker' next to the drive you want to encrypt. Enter a long and varied alphanumeric password or passphrase. IMPORTANT: Make a backup of the recovery key using one of the displayed methods. Choose whether to encrypt used disk space only (faster) and start the encryption process. Back up the drive's files (since you will have to wipe and reformat the drive). Use the encryption software to format and encrypt the drive. Transfer the files back on the encrypted drive.
A hard disk drive is also known as a hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk. It is an electromechanical data storage device. It uses one or more rigid fast rotating platters, which are coated with magnetic material to store and retrieve digital data with magnetic storage. The platters are usually arranged on a moving actuator arm paired with magnetic heads that read and write data to the platter surfaces.
The data is randomly accessed from the moving actuator arm so that separate bits of data can be kept and retrieved in any order. Hard disks are the non-volatile kind of storage that retains data even when powered off.
An introduction to the external hard drive and its encryption
What is an external hard drive?
External hard disk drives are basically a portable device that is used to store data externally. They are connected to a computer through a FireWire connection, wirelessly, or a USB.
They have typically large storage spaces to backup large amounts of data or to share data between computers easily. They also serve as a network drive. One of the most popular hard drives is a Seagate Hard Drive. The method to encrypt Seagate external hard drive is the same as others.
What do we mean by encrypting external hard drive?
Encrypting your external hard drive means that making it secure by putting a password to it. It can either be done with the help of a software or in other ways. The main purpose of encryption is to make your external hard disk safe from unauthorized persons. In this article, you'll learn how to encrypt a external hard drive.
How To Encrypt Your Backup Drive For Mac Os
How to encrypt external hard drive?
The following are the methods you can use to. Also it answers how to encrypt external hard drive Windows 10 and earlier versions of it.
- How to Encrypt External Hard Drive; Mac
With macOS, you can also encrypt whole external disk drives. You have to choose a passphrase of your choice to encrypt the drive so that no one else is able to access the drive without that passphrase. It performs like Bitlocker to go on the enterprise edition of windows, but it's obtainable to all Mac users. Follow the steps below to learn how to encrypt an external hard drive mac.
- First of all, open the finder and join the drive to your Mac. Right-Click or CTRL+Click the drive in the Finder sidebar to choose the encrypt option.
- Enter a password of your choice to encrypt the drive. The encryption process of the drive can take time, depending upon the data in the drive and the speed of the drive.
- Encrypting External Hard drive in windows
Read the following steps carefully to learn how to encrypt an external hard drive in windows.
Step no. 1:
First of all, you need to download a software which supports encryption of an external hard drive. You can download any of this software:
- TrueCrypt
- AxCrypt
- StorageCrypt
You can also you any other software of your choice
Step no. 2:
Then you have to connect the external hard disk drive to your PC and make sure it's connected properly. You need to backup your data from the external hard disk as encryption of the hard disk involves the formatting of it, which leads to data loss. So it is recommended to backup your data first.
Step no. 3:
In this step, you have to open the encryption software and click on the ‘New Volume' button. A new window will appear where the system will ask you to select the desired device.
You have to select the drive that corresponds with your external hard disk drive. If you're asked about the type of volume you want to make, then press ‘non-system volume,' as the disk you want to encrypt, is basically not the part of your computer.
Step no. 4:
Seagate Backup Drive
Select a password for your device, which will be asked every time you try you access your device. Vijay tv lollu sabha videos free for mobile. Remember that you should use a password that is hard to guess for others, but make sure that you remember that password because the device would be inaccessible without that password.
Step no. 5:
Proceed to format and encryption of the device. Primitive 1.1 for macos. This is the final step, and you just have to wait for the drive to format, and once the process finishes, your device will be encrypted.
Step no. 6:
You can transfer your data back to the drive. This time when you'll try to access the device, you would have to enter the password to get its access and transfer or view the data.
What are the advantages of encrypting external hard drive?
Following are some of the advantages of encrypting an external hard disk drive:
- Security on Multiple Devices
With smartphones and other digital devices being popular in recent years, many companies have worked to find a safe place to keep the data within the custody of the owner and safe from potential theft.
The data encryption software has helped a lot in data protection. This software ensures that the data in external hard drives is as safe as on desktop. This leads to the peace of mind of the owner of the data. Above all, device elimination can abolish the risk of infiltration from unauthorized users.
- Integrity Maintained
Organizations of all sizes worry whether the data will sustain the integrity or not if it is encrypted. Encryption saves your data from alterations, which will stop hackers from altering the data and steal it. Hackers mostly alter the data knowingly to commit data fraud.
Also, the recipients of the data will be able to view if it has been messed with. While keeping their data, many safe businesses often overlook the alteration of the data. Data encryption helps to stop the data alteration in order to keeps the privacy of the data.
- Absolute Data Protection
An absolute encryption solution layout businesses and their owners with mental satisfaction because their data is safe and completely protected in all states – at rest and in transit. With the right encryption solution, your data is almost inaccessible by unauthorized people, even hackers would have to program a brute-force style software to crack the encryption, and it would not be that much easy.
It would take so much time to encrypt the password. This ensures the peace of mind of the businesses and their owners that their data is safe and cannot be accessed by any irrelevant person. There is no other danger to your data except the hacker's attack. Even that is not too easy if your external hard drive is successfully encrypted. Bosch esi tronic 2013 keygen download.
- Compliance Ensured
Compliance is very important, and many IT departments observe legal, insurance, and industry restrictions on how data can be controlled and transferred. Encryption gives one of the options for a business to transfer and store data and obey the restrictions that your business presently has in places such as HIPAA, FIPS, PCI/DSS, FISMA, or Gramm-leach Bliley.
Every business demands basic data protection. Encryption ensures data safety for the businesses who have been recovering from a data theft incident and want to take the next step.
It keeps the data security across all devices, the transmission of data is done safely, and the data is kept in its original form whenever a file is accessed or shared. If you want to protect your business from data breaches, then you should encrypt that data with encryption software.
- Transfer Data Safely
Mostly the data is unsafe when it is being transferred from one place to another. While SSL/TSL is the industry standard for data being transferred, and it can have disadvantages for data security.
A good data encryption software assures the safety of the data at rest or in the state of being transferred. Files that are uploaded or shared to cloud storage should be to ensure that the files remain safe throughout the transfer process.
What are the disadvantages of encrypting external hard drive?
How To Encrypt Your Backup Drive For Mac Computer
Encryption of external hard drives has so many advantages, but on the other hand, it has disadvantages too. Some disadvantages of encryption of external hard disk drives are as follows:
- Requirement of Cooperation
Using encrypted drives that are shared by two or more people could be dangerous in data theft or loss. In this case, more people would know the password, and they might share the password with any other person who is not authorized for the access of the drive. If you are sharing an encrypted drive, you much have cooperation with the people who have the authorization, or else your data would no longer be safe.
- Forgetting Passwords
To encrypt an external hard disk drive, you need to allow a password to it, which will be required when you need to access or decrypt the drive. Most people use simple and easy passwords so that they remember those passwords.
In this case, passwords are weak, and they can be easily guessed by an unauthorized or unknown person who can lead to data theft. Some people have difficult passwords so that the password could not be guessed by any other person; those people usually forget the password and thus have no more access to the drive. In this case, you will never be able to access the drive again.
- A False Sense of Security Being Developed
Although the encryption software is so powerful that they provide good security to your data until someone cracks it. The computer world is becoming so fast that even a child may crack the encrypted drive in the future.
Keeping an encrypted drive may make people consider you into a false sense of security. If a person is determined to check up on you for security purposes, then it may get insecure for you to keep your data safe. If this happens, your secret data would no more be secret.
- Rise in Suspicions
If you have data encrypted in an external hard disk drive, many people like your boss and your family members may be suspicious about you. In-office, your boss will think that you're keeping the company's secrets in that drive. At home, your family members would be suspicious to know what you're hiding in the encrypted disk drive.
Tips to Secure Your External Hard Drive
Below are discussed some tips to secure your external hard drive
- Full Disk Encryption
As discussed above, the encryption of the drives, drive encryptions is more secure than just locking. It can be done on windows and macOS both, but there are different methods to encrypt the drive on these OS. Encrypting the hard disk drive provides maximum security to the drive.
The data being transferred cannot be hacked or checked by any unauthorized person. Drive encryption is done through specialized software. The methods of encrypting a drive are discussed above under the heading of ‘How to Encrypt External Hard Drive?'
- Password Lock
The external hard disk drive can be locked with a password or a pin easily through the device. No special software is needed to do so. You can connect the external hard drive to the computer and get it locked with a password directly from the device. It is less secure than drive encryption, but it is better than nothing.
Only people having the password of the drive would be able to access the drive. It is also not easily accessible by any hacker or unauthorized person. Your data will be safe, and all the access will be in your hands and the person who has the password.
You can easily set-up a password for the drive in the properties of the drive. In this case, the data being transferred is not safe enough. It can be hijacked as it is the simplest form of drive locking.
Conclusion
Basically, we discussed the Encryption of External Hard Drives, and we told you about how to encrypt an external hard drive. We discussed the methodologies of how to encrypt the external drive macOS and Windows.
If you want to keep your data safe and secure in the external hard drive, you should definitely opt for encryption of the drive. Though there are some drawbacks to encryption, they can be tolerated over the advantages of it.