If the card is already formatted to one of these, you will not need to format the drive again. You will also verify that the card is formatted to exFAT, FAT32, or NTFS to use the built-in encryption from Windows 10/11. Copy whatever information is on your flash drive or hard drive onto another secure physical location. Formatting can occur at the beginning of the process, don’t lose your data! Encrypt a Flash Drive on Windows 10/11īefore encrypting, always start with backing up your data. However, the first step you should take in any situation is to guarantee that the data on your drive is backed up before you encrypt the drive. If you are looking for the Mac guide, click Here. Like a lot of tasks on a computer, the process is different for Windows 10/11 and MacOS. But, if something or someone gets ahold of your device, it will be safer than an unencrypted drive. Physical, or tangible access to your drive will still need protection. Encrypting a flash drive or memory card password protects non-tangible access to your personal data, files, and anything you have on your media device. That’s really the best reason to encrypt any kind of drive. Encrypt a flash drive to secure your data. Click Recover and pick a suitable recovery location.

Preview & select the files you want to recover. Launch Disk Drill and scan the USB drive. Connect the USB drive to your PC and unlock it.

In addition, you need to activate the option Do not allow write access to devices configured in another organization (it's part of the setting Deny write access to removable drives not protected by BitLocker mentioned earlier).This is a brief, 5 step process, to encrypt your flash drive on Windows. To recover encrypted files from a USB drive on a Windows PC: Download and install Disk Drill for Windows. This can be any value up to 260 characters. It provides each removable drive with the corresponding ID. The setting Provide the unique identifiers for your organization is responsible for this. To prevent the user from continuing to store data on it, you can mark the drives with an organization ID.

However, the problem of lost recovery keys can still occur if a user encrypted a USB stick with BitLocker before the GPO was put in place and backed up the key himself. If the option Omit recovery options from the BitLocker setup wizard is checked, the abovementioned dialog box for saving the key is skipped, and users will not be able to save it themselves. This option can be used to hide the dialog box for saving the recovery keys

How to encrypt flash drive windows 10