I picked up one of EB’s flash drives the other day, and you won’t believe what I found. She has a Swiss bank account with tons of money in it and she’s planning to run off with Juan Valdez – the coffee mogul – and leave me with the struggling Cloudeight company. Ha! But now I know her surreptitious plans, I’m going to fix her! I have Juan’s phone number and I’m going to call him today and tell him about EB’s horrendous eating habits and terrible manners. I’m going to tell him how she sits in her weekly bubble bath – every Saturday, like clockwork – for six hours and comes out looking like a puckered white prune. I’m going to tell him all about her habit of biting her toenails. When I get done talking to Juan he wouldn’t go to Burger King with her, let alone Tropez. Here I am eating peanut butter and crackers and she’s drinking $100 bottles of Pouilly Fuisse and eating Russian caviar.
OK. It’s time to get serious now. None of the above is true (except the bubble bath part). I wrote it to make a point: If you have sensitive data on your flash drive (s) – and you take your flash drive (s) with you when you travel, have you considered what would happen if you lost your flash drives (s). If anyone found it and plugged it in to their computer, they’d have access to all that personal data.
Our freeware pick this week is a little (3MB) program that makes it easy for you to create an encrypted (and invisible) partition on your USB flash drive (s) where you can store anything you don’t want anyone else to see. If EB had had the foresight to use this program, Juan Valdez would still just be a coffee commercial dude to me, instead of a foreign interloper.
Yes I know. This is getting a bit soap opera-ish, isn’t it? It’s almost as good as watching “As the World Turns” or “Grey’s Anatomy”. You almost can’t wait to see who is going to kiss who next. Right? You want to know more about Juan and EB don’t you? Too bad. This is a family newsletter, plus a lot of the men reading this are rolling their eyes and getting up to grab a beer and a couple of Motrin. I will get down to business now. The best way to slide off this soap opera theme and back to the world of computers where I belong is to bring in the program’s developer. So here he is, Juan Valdez, the developer of today’s freeware pick:
“Rohos Mini Drive protect USB flash drive with a password by making hidden and encrypted partition on the USB flash drive memory. If you have many private files on the USB drive and want to keep them in secret, you can protect them by a password and strong encryption with Rohos Mini Drive. Also it offers a portable encryption tool to work with encrypted partition on any PC.
It doesn’t require Administrative Privileges to open password protected USB drive partition on a guest PC!
Easy to setup, easy to use. Intuitive USB flash drive Setup Wizard automatically detects your USB flash drive and setup an encrypted partition properties. You just need to provide a protection password. One click – and you can save your first file into protected volume. Encryption is automatic and on-the-fly.
You can access your secret volume by entering a right password. Disk-on notifications help you to know when secured partition gets connected or disconnected. If you click on the balloon the Explorer window will be opened on the disk.
Portable Application allows to work with a password protected partition on any PC, you just click “Rohos Mini” icon on the USB flash drive root folder and enter disk password. Rohos will start a volume and will stay in the system tray to close the disk when you finish working…”
Hey, his English grammar might even be worse than mine. But he’s a software developer and English probably isn’t his first language, so give him a break. And while you’re giving him a break, give me a break too?
The program is called Rohos Mini Drive – and the freeware version creates hidden, password-protected partitions up to two gigabytes. Remember you can only use 2GB USB flash drives with the free version. If you want to use bigger drives you gotta pay money. Just sayin’ . Don’t be writing that we didn’t warn about this — because we’re warning you – you can only use the free version of this program for USB flash drives of 2GB or less. Got it? OK! The good news: Most of us aren’t going to cart around more than two gigabytes of seriously sensitive data anyway, so the freeware version will work fine for most of us, even EB and Juan.
I bet you’re all wiping the tears from your eyes and feeling sorry for TC – the poor peanut-butter-and-cracker-eating hermit you all don’t know but love anyway. Don’t feel sorry for me, I’ve had worse days. So forget about my woes and go read more about (and download) our freeware goodie “Rohos Mini Drive” and protect your sensitive data stored on your flash drive (s).
Rohos Mini Drive is our freeware goodie today. Get it while it’s free.
Rohos Mini Drive
What is it?
A program that creates a hidden, password-protected partition on USB flash drives
Download size: 3MB