After recently misplacing a USB drive (luckily already encrypted), I decided to put  together a quick guide for anyone interested in securing their data on USB/Local drives through encryption, using free tools available for download. 

These days everyone stores huge amounts of data on USB drives (be it small pen drives or larger hard drives reaching 1TB or more). We carry this information around in our pockets everywhere, sharing with co-workers and friends, at our clients and perhaps even in public locations.

The main question you should ask yourself from a security standpoint is “What stops somebody from connecting to your drive and viewing/stealing/destroying your data?  

Remember the old DOS command format L:\ /q (this one quickly deletes Gigabytes of data in seconds – of course we could use tools to recover at the expense of your administrator’s time and nerves..).

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