Hello everyone,
I'm about to buy an USB stick. I've experienced PortebleApps before and i loved it!
But now there is no good way to easely secure your device with an password. At least, not the way like U3 does, mount the device, and first a password, before you can do annything. But the U3 has not the portable apps i want (xammp, Notepad++ and so on).
And also do i hate the U3 website, its unclear and finding anny app in the U3 website is impossible to me. Noo i would chose PortableApps way above U3. So is it possible to run PortebleApps (like found on this site) on an U3 drive? (Without installing PortableApps Platform). Or is there an solution for the only problem of Portable apps, the non-existence of an password protection?
Cheers, and have a nice day!
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You could buy a drive with hardware encryption which would prevent your data being accessed without a password and then put portableapps on it. I'd recommend one but I don't personally have/need one.
What drives do have hardware encryption then?
The only ones i can find is Ironkey wich cost around 120 euro's.
And i'm not willing to pay that kind of money for a 4 gig flash drive....
Kingston, IQBio and many other manufacturers have hardware encryption for less.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I used to use a Verbatim Store 'n' Go that has an encrypted partition.
I have just purchased this one few days ago.
OK, it claims to have hardware encryption... AES256 etc.
Could not find out still if this is true.
It is much cheaper then all others from kingstone etc.
But, it emulates two drives, not only two partitions, it makes two drives each with own partition. One is 'open' the other can be password protected. The size of both can be varied.
However, the software used to resize the drives (and partitions) is the same as needed to enter the password! This implies, that
***to enter the password, one needs admin rights.***
This makes the whole thing worthless.
Apart from that, it behaves similar way as U3, that means after setting the password, the drive is present but the partition data of the included partition are missing, so I assume it works somehow similar, nothing much to do with real encryption.
OK, the drives are both removable disk, not CD, so one can use them also 'unencrypted' as two drives.
The 'hardware encryption' also works only under windows. The partitioning and password enter software can be obtained for w98 too, but in such case also disk2go driver has to be used, with generic w98 driver, the password entering software will not be able to enter the password anyway.
So all together a big, big joke. OK, the drive is fast, it is single layer NAND, so one of the better quality, but not all sold as hardware encryption deserves the name.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I've ordered this one.
http://www.primoit.co.uk/product.asp?ProdID=PI_100076
It too claims hardware encryption, but requires password, which leads me to 'think' it might need admin rights.
I hope not.