The USB key as "key of contact" for the PC – News Digital: Services & Apps

You do not have to be a radical opponent of the cloud to appreciate the small practical storage media: USB sticks are suitable for large amounts of data that would be too heavy to store on the network . They are for the most delicate things that are not allowed on the internet. And they guarantee the availability of data and documents even when Internet access is insufficient.

And USB sticks – and analog discs – are real "jack-of-all-trades" that make more turns than you think. We detail four in the video:

The Encryption. USB storage media have a disadvantage: if you lose them, the searcher can do what he wants with the data. Unless they are encrypted, there is no access for others. With Windows, it is easy to encrypt external storage media: In Explorer, click on the drive icon and select "Enable BitLocker" from the context menu. Follow the wizard, assign a password and save the recovery key.

Incidentally, you do not need to enter the password on your PC, the data is automatically encrypted and decrypted – you do not even realize that encryption is used. When it is used on other computers, the password is requested.

Bitlocker is active here and only reveals the data in relation to the password.

A major disadvantage is that Windows 10 Home does not have the bitlocker function. If you set encryption on another computer with Pro, Enterprise, or Windows 10 in S mode, the encrypted media can also be used with the Windows 10 PC. An alternative is Veracrypt.

On a Mac, click the drive icon while holding down the Control key, and then choose the Encrypt command on the shortcut menu. And by the way: There are also USB storage devices with hardware encryption feature. The Kingston Data Traveler 2000 (from around CHF 60 for the 4 GB version), the code is entered via a control panel. This makes it possible to use encryption with very different operating systems.

Synchronization of data. To ensure that the necessary data is always available on the USB flash drive, a synchronization program is recommended. In the video, the free program Sync Toy from Microsoft is presented: The couples of files are determined whose contents are compared.

But there are also some excellent alternatives, for example the Aborange.de Synchronizer program presented here. It costs 29 euros for home users in the full version.

Portable Apps. Important programs can be installed on the USB flash drive. On the Mac, it works without special precautions with the vast majority of programs. This is not intended for Windows. But it also works with the specially adapted program variants of Portableapps.com. However, you must make sure that the programs are installed correctly and correctly started – in a traditional way, you can not reach your destination via the Start menu.

In the video, we also explain a very practical application for which portable applications are not explicitly provided. are – but this is very handy when working with restrictively configured work tools.

Lock and unlock the computer. A USB storage device can, frankly, also serve as a key of contact: it guarantees that the computer is accessible only if a storage medium is connected. The software that makes this possible is called USB Raptor and is free. Advantage: Compared to the lock function (with the Windows key and L for "Lock"), you can unlock the computer without entering the password by simply re-infecting the USB key.

The USB key as a key contact

Start the computer with the USB key. In the video, an option was not disclosed because it would have scrambled the frame: the ability to put an entire operating system on the external storage device. This opens the possibility of having all the working environment on the storage medium – it is even possible to install multiple operating systems to choose the one with which to work at startup.

Windows To Go is the name of the feature on the Microsoft operating system. You get the backgrounds here. The instructions for Windows To Go can be found on the net, for example on PC-magazin.de. For Linux, there are appropriate instructions depending on the distribution, here for example for Ubuntu. You will find detailed information on the installation possibilities of several systems on a single stick in the additional edition 9-18 of the computer magazine "PC-Welt". (Tagesanzeiger.ch/Newsnet)

Created: 08.07.2018, 08:23