External hard drives and USB flash drives are very common, they can be easily transported and they are liked for this very reason. Of course, this is a great benefit to us all, however, this can be a negative as the portability means these devices can be an easy target for thieves. I would feel much more comfortable knowing files within my external storage drive are password protected.
In my experience, I have not seen many people password-protect their devices, perhaps because those users are unsure of how they can go about doing this. If you are someone who would like to encrypt and password-protect your external storage device, I will explain how you can go about doing this.
How to Install the Encryption Software Onto Your External Storage Device
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To start off, access your internet browser, search for SanDisk encryption, and access the Sandisk website shown in the video above, to download their encryption tool. Alternatively, access the download page here.
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Find and click on the download option for your machine (Windows or Mac).
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Thirdly connect your external device to your computer and open it. Then copy the downloaded software installer, from the previous step, into your external storage device / USB.
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Then double-click on the software installer inside of your external device, to launch it. Read through the user license agreement, accept the terms, and then click next.
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The application will then ask you to enter a new password, please do so now, then click on the OK button and then next. The setup is now complete.
Using the Encryption Software
After completing the setup, the tool will automatically open.
This tool is very easy to use, dragging and dropping files from your machine into this tool will store them.
After logging out or closing the tool, and re-accessing the external storage device, you will find that your files cannot be seen or accessed there, instead, you will find a folder with a bunch of encrypted files and a couple of icons for the tool.
To access your files and folders, double-click on the tool to launch it, enter your password from step 5 and you will immediately have access to your files.
