VeraCrypt - Encrypting a USB Flash Drive

today i want to cover how to encrypt a usb drive so it can be opened on any computer without having any additional software installed if you want to learn more about this topic then please watch the rest of this video if you haven't already done so please show your support by subscribing and click that notifications icon so you'll be notified of any future content so back in january i did a video on using veracrypt to encrypt either a drive or a volume since then i've received some questions about how to encrypt a usb drive so that it can be carried around with you and opened on any computer regardless of whether or not the software's been installed on it so today's video i want to walk you through how to do that and take advantage of a really powerful tool so let's walk through the process of setting up and creating a usb so that i can carry data with me without having to worry about whether or not the computer i'm going to be opening it on has veracrypt installed so for starters you have to already have veracrypt in some fashion meaning you have to either have it installed on the computer or download the portable mode if you look at their website they have two versions of veracrypt to download one is the installer which will put it on your computer which is the way i recommend you doing it basically installing it on your computer so that you don't have to worry about having different versions of different places and the other option is the portable version now the portable version is basically the same as the installation version other than it doesn't actually install it actually just extracts the files and allows you to extract it to a directory so they can be run from that directory for the purposes of this example or this video we're going to actually use the installation version and although the steps are exactly the same if you use the portable version you're just running it from a you know a local directory that's really kind of handy is if you're going to put it on a larger usb drive or have it you know as part of your software collection you can just execute anytime you want on any computer so let's assume for a moment that you have the installed version and let's walk through the process to see how it actually is done i'm not going to go through the actual installation since that's already referred to on my other video so we're just going to pick up from the the part where it's already installed and let's see how to actually create the usb stick so we're going to go ahead and launch veracrypt and we're going to go up to the tools menu and we're going to click traveler disk setup now what this does is basically creates and prepares the usb drive and copies all the necessary files that he needs to actually run so the very first thing it asks it asks us to do is to is to point to the root folder so we're going to go ahead and do that we're going to click on the e drive so that is now um that is basically the assign drive now this again assumes that your drive your usb drive has already been formatted and and ready to go and make sure what i would suggest when you format is you use the exfat ear partition you can use others but i just found better results using expat so once i've pointed to the to the uh root folder it has a couple options here i can include the veracrypt creation wizard i can include the volume expander i'm going to leave those at default and then i can include an auto run configuration now the auto run configuration will work but it only works a part of the time that's one of the downsides is because depending on your windows security settings and how you have it configured it may or may not auto start but for purposes of this exercise we're going to assume it's going to actually auto start so we're going to click on auto start and then we're going to hit create and it says the disk's been created and quickly i'm going to look over and i'm going to look at the e drive and i'm going to see that it's created an auto run inf file and it's copied in in a folder called veracrypt all the folders i'm get or all the files i'm going to need so we'll get back to this in a minute let's go ahead and finish it off so the next step is to actually create my volume so i'm going to do that now i can do this a couple different ways i can since i've already got veracrypt installed i can just go ahead and create create a volume and walk through the wizard this way or if i'm doing this and i want to create a separate volume and i don't have the software installed i can actually go to the drive go to the vericrypt folder and double click on veracrypt and it will launch the same application again this is in portable mode the way i'm going to describe it here is i'm going to actually create the encrypted file container onto the usb drive so i'm going to leave this at default click next i'm going to leave it as a standard volume although you can pick the hidden if you prefer and then i'm going to go ahead and select the file that i'm creating so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to put this in a folder called data and i'm going to say now you don't have to put it in the folder you can leave it in the root it's really up to you i just like the file organization aspect of this so i just do it this way but it's totally up to you i'm going to click save and you can see the the path here i will never want to save history i'm going to hit next i'm going to leave all this at default i'm going to hit next and here's where i want to select the size now i've got a 32 gig flash drive in there but we have to reserve some of the space for the the file so we can't do the entire thing so what i'm going to do is just for the purposes of this exercise i'm just going to make this a a 5 gig file just so it doesn't take all day to create when you're creating an encrypted volume on an on a usb it's very dependent on the speed of the usb and it can take an extremely long time in this particular this test system that i'm running right now i've only got usb2o so it's going to take you longer so i'm going to leave this pretty small obviously i could make this a lot larger um if i wanted to if i had the space if i'm carrying around a 128 gig usb stick or drive then obviously i can i'm going to make this a lot bigger but just be aware it takes a while i'm going to go ahead and click next and i'm going to put in a password telling me i'm just using a test password so yeah i understand it too short and i do want large file support so i'm going to click next so here they want you to actually roll your mouse around and just kind of basically come up with random characters so i'm going to do that until the line turns green and that's good enough right now i'm going to click on format and here it's going to format now i'm going to go ahead and jump to the end here because uh otherwise you'll have to sit through you know 5 or 10 minutes of blistering speed of usb2o okay and at the end it's going to probably prompt you for because it needs administrator right one last prompt before it actually completes the volume and there it is i wanted to remind you that between the time you start the format in the time it completes can be significantly long and as a matter of fact it looks like it gets to the end and then just pauses for quite some time don't avoid it just let it wait it's very slow process once it's created though you're good to go so now the volume's been created i'm going to go ahead and click exit so if we take a quick look at the e drive we now see what we saw before and we now see the encrypted volume that i just created called protected files roughly five gigs if i take this to a computer that does not have bearcrypt installed i need to launch included version so again if we look at the files veracrypt is included there's a veracrypt.exe file and if i click this on any computer it's not going to install it's just simply going to run and allow me to open that usb encrypted volume now what i typically do to make things a little easier and it's not necessary it just depends on you know how simple you want to make it is i actually create a shortcut to here so i'm going to create shortcut and i'm going to actually cut this and i'm going to move it to the root so that way if my computer does not auto run which many windows 10 systems want double click on the shortcut and go right into the section that allows me to attach so now that i'm here i'm going to actually select file i'm going to go to the e drive and i'm going to go to my data folder click on the protected files volume that i just created click open and i'm going to attach it to the t drive just for the fun of it and i'm going to go ahead and save them out of course it asks me for passwords i'm going to do that and i'm going to click ok takes a few seconds to attach and there it is it's attached to the t drive so now if i look at my explorer i can now see that i've got the e drive which is the unencrypted usb drive which contains my encrypted folder and my encrypted folder is here so now whatever files i copy to that will be encrypted into that volume and i can bring it with me and of course i all need to dismount this so when i'm actually in veracrypt i will have to dismount my t volume so that i can actually eject the usb drive so let's go ahead and do that i'm going to go ahead and dismount it's dismounted now if i want to actually eject this i'll be able to there it is but that's basically the only process that you need it's just an extra step the rest of it worked almost exactly to the standard veracrypt program the only thing is you're basically creating a portable version onto a usb drive that's about it for this video today i hope you've enjoyed it and as always if you haven't done so please subscribe it does help support the channel click that notifications icon you'll be notified of any future content and of course if you like this video throw it alive thanks for watching and i'll see you on the next video you

Channel: Mike Faucher

Views: 4,026

Keywords: Veracrypt USB Drive, Veracrypt - Encrypting a USB Drive, Veracrypt, veracrypt usb encryption, veracrypt usb encryption software, usb encryption software, encryption software, encrypting usb drive, Encrypting a USB drive, disk encryption, How to securely encrypt a usb flash drive for free, how to encrypt a usb flash drive using bitlocker or veracrypt, veracrypt usb drive encryptiion, Veracrypt usb drive encryption, Encrypting Flash drives

Id: -90DgLNOz_0

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020