- Mac Os X Encrypted Usb Flash Drive Windows 10
- Toshiba Encrypted Usb Flash Drive
- Kingston Encrypted Usb Flash Drive
Feb 21, 2020 Step 1. Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac computer. Step 2.Go to Applications Utilities Double click and open Disk Utility. Select your USB flash drive on the sidebar, choose Erase. Rename the USB flash drive, choose the format as MS-DOS (FAT) for Format, Master Boot Record for Scheme. Then click Erase. Sep 05, 2018 This guide applies to encrypting a flash drive on macOS El Capitan and Sierra using the built in encryption tool known as FileVault. Drives encrypted with FileVault CANNOT be opened by Windows. The password you choose to protect your USB flash drive CANNOT be changed once it is configured. Follow the steps below to encrypt a USB flash drive. The APFS is the default used in the newer Mac operating system, also known as macOS 10.13 High Sierra — and is optimized for flash drives. Hierarchical File System (HFS) Plus The HFS+ filesystem, also known as Mac OS Extended, is used by Apple to encrypt removable media on older versions of macOS. Now when you connect your USB flash drive to a Mac and view its contents in Finder, you will see a DMG disk image file. Double-click this DMG file, enter the password, and it will be mounted for use. Copy, paste, save, and delete files here like you would anywhere else.
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?
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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.
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. 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. 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. 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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Encrypting a USB drive so only authorized users have access is always a good idea when dealing with sensitive or private information. But what happens when you want to access that same data on a Mac and you don't have the ability to use the same software to decrypt and unlock the drive? BitLocker for Windows poses exactly that kind of problem because it only works on Windows computers. So, if you're using a USB drive encrypted by BitLocker on a Mac, there's really no direct way to access the content in encrypted drive on Mac. Fortunately, there's a workaround for it, which is what this article outlines.
Although BitLocker is not natively supported on Mac machines, there are several third-party tools you can use to gain access to a USB drive that has been encrypted with it. One such utility is M3 BitLocker Loader for Mac. The software is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 and higher versions, and can unlock a wide range of storage devices like USB drives, external hard drives, SD cards and more. You can also use it to encrypt a drive, but that involves formatting the drive with a Windows-friendly file system like NTFS or FAT32.
How to Open Encrypted USB on Mac with M3 BitLocker Loader
M3 BitLocker Loader for Mac essentially provides the environment in which to access drives or other devices that have been encrypted with AES in CBC mode using BitLocker, which uses a 128-bit or 256-bit encryption key.
To open an encrypted USB on a Mac, follow the steps described below:
Step 1: As a first step, install the application on your Mac.
Step 2: Launch the program and insert the USB drive into the Mac. To make sure that you're able to access the drive, make sure that it has not been corrupted. If it has, you may need to use a recovery program to get it back to a working state.
Mac Os X Encrypted Usb Flash Drive Windows 10
Step 3: In the M3 Loader window, you may see an error message after inserting the drive. Simply click on the Ignore option if that happens. This is merely a format conflict between the drive and macOS, but since you're using a third-party application to access the drive, you can choose to ignore the alert.
Step 4: Click on the drive in the software window and then on Open. When prompted for the password, enter it and click Unlock.
Step 5: Once the drive has been decrypted, you can access the folders and files inside just as if you were working inside the native Finder app in Mac.
Please note that the drive can not be unlocked unless you have the password. This is not a password utility. It merely allows you to mount the drive virtually and decrypt it so you can access the contents of the drive on a Mac.
Toshiba Encrypted Usb Flash Drive
Remove BitLocker Encryption from USB on Mac
If you forgot the open password of encrypted USB driver or just want to remove protection from the USB so you can use it more freely on Mac, then it is advised to remove the password from encrypted USB. Fortunately, this can be done on Mac for free.
Step 1: After taking a backup of the data on your USB drive on a Windows PC, insert it into the Mac.
Step 2: Open the Disk Utility application from the Applications >Utilities folder.
Step 3: In the left panel, look for the encrypted drive and select it.
Step 4: From the toolbar at the top, select the Erase button. The drive will be erased and the encryption removed. You can then choose to format the drive, but that's beyond the scope of this article.
Using the information above, you can easily open an encrypted USB drive on Mac or remove the encryption so the drive can be used for other purposes.
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