Help Me Secure My External Drive

February 17, 2008 12:40 PM

Is there a way to make my external hard drive only accessible to me without too seriously decreasing the ease of use when I am using it?

This might be a basic question, but I'm not too brilliant with this sort of thing.

I have an external firewire drive connected to a MacBook Pro running OS X Leopard. I've been using Time Machine to backup the drive regularly and I also store other random stuff on the external. I like this functionality, but I don't like the fact that all of my data will show up to anyone who plugs in my drive can see all my data. What are my options for making the data only available to me while still being able to use the drive essentially as I have been before.

posted by ecab to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You need to create a secure sparse image. Then make a shortcut to that secure sparse image and place it on your desktop. When you want to get at your secret files, double click the shortcut and you'll be prompted for the password. The sparse image will then mount like a disk and can be accessed as normal.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030212055706937

Top tip! Don't tick "save password" if you want your sparse image to stay secure.
posted by dance at 1:03 PM on February 17, 2008

TrueCrypt. Very easy to use encryption. You WILL experience some overhead in file writing, so it's not ideal if you're using the external drive for editing audio or video. Viewing/listening is fine. You can minimize this by using 'lighter' weight encryption schemes.

I've never used the OSX version, but the windows version is excellent.
posted by fishfucker at 1:14 PM on February 17, 2008

i second truecrypt, very easy...
posted by joshgray at 1:25 PM on February 17, 2008

I'll third Truecrypt. I've been using it on external drives for years. All you need to do is enter a passphrase when you connect the drive, and after that it's just like a standard drive.

As a side note: I'm firmly convinced that every laptop should have Truecrypt installed on it as default. It's just way too easy to have personal/sensitive/secret/private information stolen if a laptop is lost or stolen.
posted by gwenzel at 4:08 PM on February 17, 2008

Fourth for TrueCRypt, use it on my laptop and external drive for backups.
posted by arcticseal at 10:14 PM on February 17, 2008

TrueCrypt is great, and would be a great solution if you need something cross-platform. However, if this is a Mac only drive, and you never want to mount the encrypted image on a machine that's not running Mac OS X, then 'dance' has it right -- this capability is part of Mac OS X. The hdiutil command that dance links to will help you create an image that grows, or you can use Disk Utility to make one of a fixed size.

I use both -- I have a small TrueCrypt volume on my USB Key (along with TC installers for Mac/Win/Linux) with emergency stuff on it, and I have a portable external firewire drive with an encrypted image on it that's just for critical backups on my Mac.
posted by eafarris at 5:38 AM on February 18, 2008 [1 favorite]