Best way to password protect external drive

macgabe
macgabe
Community Member

Nothing to do with 1P, but I wonder if anyone has an opinion on how best to password protect an external drive.

It will be a 2TB USB3, with only photos, which I will take with me while travelling, as an external drive for my MacBook Air. The photos will be accessed via a Lightroom catalogue on my macbook.

Until now I would only carry with me photos that I actually took on that trip, but I've decided that drives are so small and fast nowadays, that I might as well save some time and put the photos straight on to my main drive, which will of course be backed up at home.

But if the drive or drive and computer are stolen, I don't want all of my photos to be easily accessible, as it's years of work - I'm a photographer.

So I'm looking into the different possibilities. I've seen that I can create an encrypted drive from the outset with Disk Utility, or use FileVault maybe, or encrypt each file and folder.

I'm not clear what the pros and cons of each solution are. Obviously the drive mustn't be visible to Windows/Linux users either, and ideally it would not even be recoverable by reformatting and using recovery software. But I don't want to slow things down excessively either. And the photos must be readable by Lightroom.

Comments

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni

    Our app Knox will allow you to create secure vaults for storing files on your main drive. It also will create a whole drive vault on an external drive. You can download the Knox trial and test it for yourself. Let me know if you have any questions. :)

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