Posted: 1/7/2013 11:40:01 AM EDT
| I need a secure flashdrive for transporting sensitive files to and from work. Can anyone recommend one? I'm not looking at paying a ton of money - maybe sub $100. |
|
I have experimented with this using the Encrypted File System on Professional and Ultimate versions of Windows. Basically what you do is set up an encrypted folder, then transfer your encryption certificate to your other computer, so both computers can read the encrypted files. Just drop the files in the folder to encrypt them, then drag them to your flash drive. Only the computers that have the encryption certificate can open the files.
If you have Ultimate version of windows you can use BitLocker to Go which will password protect a flash drive. |
|
I would not trust anything Windows. Likewise, I would be leery or anything that is not open source.
I use a 1tb Western Digital passport drive. About the size of a pack of smokes. I use truecrypt as mentioned. The drive can be used on any computer that I have admin rights on, or something that already has truecrypt installed. For all intents and purposes, it's about as secure as you can get. You could do the same with any old thumbdrive. The Truecrypt install partition only needs to be around 10mb. |
|
Quoted:
I would not trust anything Windows. Likewise, I would be leery or anything that is not open source. I use a 1tb Western Digital passport drive. About the size of a pack of smokes. I use truecrypt as mentioned. The drive can be used on any computer that I have admin rights on, or something that already has truecrypt installed. For all intents and purposes, it's about as secure as you can get. You could do the same with any old thumbdrive. The Truecrypt install partition only needs to be around 10mb. If you are worried about it you can do a bootable Ubuntu thumbdrive and install TrueCrypt in there. That's about as secure as you can get unless you bring your own hardware. |
|
You can get a 1 GB Ironkey for under $100 that will be more than enough space for Excel files and more flexible that using Truecrypt on a standard USB. I think mine was $65. The issue with using Truecrypt on a standard USB is that you need Truecrypt installed on the computer you plug it into. If you do not have it installed, there is a way to do it anyway (TC has instructions in the menu) but you will need admin rights on the computer. Depending on where you will be using it, this may be out of the question, such as work computers, libraries, university computer labs, etc. Ironkey doesn't need this and is also built like a tank. Only thing about Ironkeys is that they do not work on Linux AFAIK.
|