If you have one of those neat little portable drives hundreds of Gigabytes large, it’s only natural you begin to worry about losing it and having others get their hands on your data. So… is there a way to password protect your external hard drive?

You can encrypt the drive and require a password to decrypt it using a tool like TrueCrypt which is free.

There is a huge down side to password protecting the entire external hard drive. If you ever forget your password, there will be no recovering. Tools like TrueCrypt do the job really really well and unfortunately humans don’t do as well remembering their passwords. No point trying to kid yourself you won’t forget either. You may not forget the password but after a while you may forget which of these unforgettable combinations were used on which devices.

Can you tell I’ve been there?

The Internet is full of tech support stories where people called up essentially asking help for a bricked external hard drive. What should you do instead if you want to password protect the external hard drive?

Create a folder just for files you want to protect and encrypt that folder only. This way if you ever forget, at the very least you still have the use of the rest of the drive. Better salvage some than lose the use of the drive entirely.

And finally, no. This is NOT the way to try to remember your password 😉

Don't tape your password to your devices - obvious right? Apparently not.