Posts Tagged ‘usbcrypt’

Why can’t I copy large files over 4GB to my USB flash drive?

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

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The capacity of your external flash drive is large: 8GB, 16GB, or more. There is enough free space on the drive. You can copy the smaller files to the external drive just fine. Yet, when you attempt to copy a large file (4GB or larger) to the external drive, Windows gives you an error (such as: There is not enough free space on the drive, or similar.) Does this sound familiar?

If you experience such a problem, most probably it’s caused by the fact that your flash drive is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This type of a file system has a built-in limitation on the size of the files that it may contain. Although the total size of the files that you can copy to a FAT32 drive could be as large as 2TB (or the physical capacity of the drive, whichever is smaller), the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB.

This limitation may sound silly: why would anyone design a system that would not allow for the larger files? The problem is, when the FAT32 file system was designed (that was back in the days of Windows 95), no one anticipated that we would have such large files in use today. Or, maybe the designers hoped that by the time such large files become common, the use of the FAT32 system would be replaced by the more modern systems.

In any case, how to solve the problem of copying the 4GB files? Easy: you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with the NTFS file system. The latter does not have the 4GB file size limitation, and it also allows for many other functions not supported by FAT32: file security, encryption, compression, etc.

One caveat, however: the older versions of Windows (such as Windows 95, 98, or Windows Millennium, remember those?) do not support the NTFS file system. If you plan on using the drive with such old computers, then DO NOT format the drive with NTFS, because you won’t be able to get the old Windows to recognize it anyway. If, however, you only plan on using the drive with the more recent versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and of course Windows 7, such computers should work with the NTFS drives just fine.

How to change the drive from FAT32 to NTFS format?

There are several ways to go. If the drive is empty or contains no important files of yours, the easiest way is to use the Windows Format command to format the drive with the NTFS file system. Specifically:

1. Attach the external flash drive to the computer, wait for Windows to recognize it and assign a new drive letter to it.

2. Open the Computer folder and locate the drive letter assigned to the flash drive you want to format with NTFS (in the example below, it’s drive F:)

3. Before continuing, open the drive in a window and make sure it’s empty or does not contain any important files, because after you format a drive, all information that was on it will be erased! If there are files on the drive that you want to keep, take this opportunity to copy them over to the hard drive or some other drive.

4. If you are sure that the external drive contains no important files of yours, go back to the Computer folder, and right click on the icon of the external drive:

(Click to enlarge)

5. Select Format from the menu, and then choose the formatting options:

Options for formatting the external drive with NTFS file system

6. Make sure to select NTFS in the File System drop-down list. That’s what determines the kind of a file system that the drive should have. Also, you may want to select the Quick Format option, which should speed up the formatting process quite considerably.

7. Press Start, and Windows should warn you once again about erasing any existing information on the drive (see step 3 above). Again, if you are sure the drive does not contain any irreplaceable documents, confirm that you want to proceed with the formatting:

Windows warns you about erasing the existing files during the drive formatting

8. If you’ve selected the Quick format option, the formatting should take no longer than a minute or two.

As a result, you should have the same drive, but now it should have the NTFS files system on it. Now you should be able to copy the files larger than 4GB to the drive just fine.

In addition to formatting a drive with the NTFS file system, Windows also offers a way to convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS. The difference is that the conversion process would keep the existing files on the drive. See Windows Help and Support of your computer for the instructions on how to do the conversion.

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Personal license $49.95
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P.S. Our encryption software USBCrypt can create a NTFS-formatted Virtual Encrypted Disk even if the host drive is formatted with FAT32. This suggests yet another solution: instead of formatting the host disk with NTFS, you can instead use USBCrypt to create a NTFS-formatted Virtual Encrypted Disk. If you do that, then in addition to breaking the 4GB file size barrier, you would also get the strong security and password protection for files you put inside of the Virtual Encrypted Disk. See the USBCrypt web page for more information or to download a free 30-day trial.

P.P.S. If you only need to transfer a large file from one computer to another, you can get by with the FAT format if you use a file splitter utility, like the one included in our file manager AB Commander. Using its Split command, you can split a large file into smaller chunks (say, 2GB each). Such chunks can be put on a FAT-formatted drive without a problem. Then, on the destination computer, use the Merge command to combine the chunks together into the original file. Of course, if you want to open the file directly from the external FAT drive, this won’t help you, but just to transfer the file between Windows computers should work fine.

P.P.P.S. Here is what to do if Windows does not offer the NTFS format option.

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Test the strength of your password with USBCrypt

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

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Personal license $49.95
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When using USBCrypt to password protect drives, you have probably wondered, how difficult would it be for someone to just try all possible character combinations and discover the correct password that way? If someone were to write a program to automate the process of simulating the password entry, how fast would it take to discover the correct password?

Well, you may be surprised to learn that there is no need to write a special program for that, because USBCrypt already includes such a command out of the box! It’s easy to try it: just try starting an encrypted drive, as usual, but instead of entering the password, click on the Tools button and select the Recover Password item on the menu:

On the next screen, select the character set you want to try. You can select the minimum and maximum length of the passwords to try, and also choose between the lower-case or upper-case characters, digits, special characters, or any combination of them:

The settings for the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

When you press the Start button, USBCrypt starts to try the passwords from the character set you’ve selected, in turn, until it finds one that unlocks the encrypted drive. It displays the progress in a separate window, that also shows the estimated time to complete the enumeration of all possible passwords:

The progress of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

If you’ve selected a very simple password, it can be discovered rather quickly, and the result is displayed right away:

The successful result of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

What about the more complex passwords? The time to try them all grows rapidly as the length of the password or its complexity increases. Here are a few numbers, obtained on a computer with a mid-range (as of the time of this writing) Intel i5-650 CPU:

Characters/Maximum length	Up to 3	Up to 5	Up to 7
Lowercase	30 minutes	15 days	28 years
Lowercase + Uppercase	4 hours	1 year	35 hundred years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits	7 hours	3 years	12 thousand years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits + all special characters	1 day	26 years	240 thousand years

(You may get different numbers, depending on the CPU your computer has.)

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
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As you can see, by choosing a password that’s complex enough, you can protect your secrets with USBCrypt pretty well. On the flip side, take care to remember your password, because if you forget it, it would be practically impossible to recover it (unless you have created a spare key file with USBCrypt, of course.

Happy encrypting!

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Personal vs business license for USBCrypt

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

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We offer two kinds of licenses for the continued use of USBCrypt: personal and business.

The personal license is available for purchase at a discount, and it entitles you to use USBCrypt for the home, personal use only. For example, you can use USBCrypt under the personal license to encrypt drives that you use to store your personal files: documents, photos, videos, tax returns, financial records, and so on.

However, if you use USBCrypt to encrypt any files related to your business or employment, you must purchase the business license. For example, if in addition to your personal files you also use your encrypted drives to transport files between your office and home, you must purchase a business license.

The functionality of USBCrypt under the personal or business license is the same, except that when USBCrypt is registered with a business license, it gives you additional choices of the encryption algorithms:

Algorithm available with:	USBCrypt personal license	USBCrypt business license
AES-128	•	•
AES-256	•	•
Twofish-128		•
Twofish-256		•
AES-Twofish-512		•
XTS mode	•	•
CBC mode		•

AES-128 stands for Advanced Encryption Standard with 128-bit key, and AES-256 selects the same AES algorithm but with the 256-bit key.

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Twofish-128 stands for Twofish algorithm with a 128-bit encryption key, and Twofish-256 means Twofish encryption with a 256-bit key. Finally, the choice of AES-Twofish-512 gives you the cascade encryption algorithm that is a combination of AES-256 and TF-256 with the effective key length of 512 bit.

The XTS encryption mode is considered the best choice at the time of this writing. Business customers can also select the CBC mode which is an older standard that has some deficiencies, but may be required for compliance with some requirements you might have.

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Can USBCrypt encrypt the C: drive?

Monday, October 4th, 2010

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Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

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Although the primary function of USBCrypt is to protect the external and removable drives from unauthorized access, it’s possible to encrypt the main system C: drive with it as well. Yes, you can use USBCrypt software to create a Virtual Encrypted Disk hosted on the C: drive, and use it to store your sensitive files and folders in the Virtual Encrypted Disk. The only difference when using the C: drive as the host for the Virtual Encrypted Disk is that the C: drive is always plugged in to the computer.

If you want to create a Virtual Encrypted Disk on the C: drive, the only thing you need to do when running USBCrypt is enable the “Include the system drive in the list” option:

The option to include the system drive in the USBCrypt list

After that, you can proceed as usual: select the desired size for the Virtual Encrypted Disk, the encryption algorithm, the password and so on. Before starting, however, it’s a good idea to create a full backup of your system drive, to be able to start over if something goes not as expected.

When deciding on the size of the Virtual Encrypted Disk to create, do not make it take all available free space: leave plenty of room on the host disk for use by Windows.

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Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

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After the Virtual Encrypted Disk has been created, you can start it as usual (it will have a separate drive letter, other than C:), and move the files and documents you want to be private to the encrypted drive. Be careful NOT TO MOVE the Windows folder and other folders you might see on the C: drive (such as Program Files, ProgramData, Documents and Settings, Users, etc.) These are system folders that must remain where they are, or Windows may start doing weird things. Only move the files and documents that need to be protected, leave everything else where it is.

Happy encrypting!

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Make it easy to return your lost encrypted drive

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

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Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

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If you’ve lost a removable drive encrypted with USBCrypt, you know your files are safe – no one will be able to get to them without knowing your encryption password, and the only loss you suffer in such a case is the cost of the physical drive itself. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to get the drive back?

Sure, you can increase the chance of getting your drive back by putting a message on it to be seen by the person who finds the drive. USBCrypt makes it easy to create such a message: just enter the appropriate text as the host disk name when encrypting the drive:

The message to the founder as the host disk name

(If you’ve already encrypted the drive, you can change the host disk name with the Rename host disk command). The host disk name is the first thing the person sees after plugging the drive in the computer:

The message appears when someone plugs the drive in the computer

Even if the computer happens to have the autoplay function disabled, the person would see the message when s/he opens the Computer folder:

The message is shown as the label of the drive

Yet another place to catch attention of the person who found the drive is the screen that appears when s/he runs the file USBCrypt.exe off the encrypted drive:

The built-in message when unlocking the encrypted drive

You don’t have to do anything to make such a message to appear, it appears automatically, and the name that is included in the message is the registered name that your copy of the software was licensed to (that is, presumably, your name). If the person clicks on the Not you? link, s/he will be presented with the following message:

The built-in message when unlocking the encrypted drive

This message gives the person an opportunity to contact us with the details of the drive found, and we in turn would attempt to locate your email address in our records and let you know that someone has found your lost drive. Note that what happens after that is entirely up to you, whether you want to reward the person who found the drive or not, etc. would be entirely your decision, we would just offer you our help with getting in touch with that person.

Of course, the best solution to any such problem would be not to lose the drive in the first place. However, it’s a good idea to be prepared for such a misfortune before it might happen.

Happy encrypting!

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USBCrypt updated to v.10.9

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

We’ve just released yet another update to our encryption product USBCrypt. This is a maintenance release that includes several fixes and improvements, such as:

In some usage scenarios, the Optimize for performance option could cause 100% of the available RAM to be consumed. We have corrected that.
When encrypting a drive, the size of the Virtual Encrypted Disk can now be selected using units other than MB.
The size of the Virtual Encrypted Disk is now displayed when choosing the Properties command from the taskbar icon right-click menu.

If you are already using a previous version of USBCrypt, you don’t need to remove it: just download and run the new version, and it should update the previous version while keeping your settings and customizations intact.

Happy encrypting!

Using names and labels to organize USBCrypt drives

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
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If you use USBCrypt to protect just one or two drives, it’s easy to keep track of them. However, when the number of the encrypted drives grows, it becomes more difficult to keep them organized. The fact that each physical drive can be represented by two drive letters (one for the host drive and another one for the Virtual Encrypted Disk it contains) does not make it any easier. To help you manage the encrypted drives, USBCrypt offers you the options of assigning names to them. There are several names used by USBCrypt and Windows in different places of their user interfaces. Let us discuss them in detail.

When you encrypt a drive for the first time, USBCrypt asks you to choose two names: the Virtual Encrypted Disk name and the Host Disk name:

Choosing the encrypted drive name

The first name (for the Virtual Encrypted Disk) is used when displaying the windows and menus of USBCrypt. For example, it is shown on the USBCrypt window when starting the encrypted disk:

Starting a Virtual Encrypted Disk

This name is also displayed on the USBCrypt “balloon” notifications:

Or, when you right-click on a USBCrypt taskbar icon, you can see the name of Virtual Encrypted Disk on the menu:

As you can see, by using different names with different Virtual Encrypted Disk, you can make it easier to recognize them in Windows.

What about the second name you are asked to enter when encrypting a drive, the Host Disk name? This name is displayed by Windows as a label next to the host disk:

The Host Disk label

You can change the default name “USBCrypt Host Disk” to something more descriptive. Keep in mind, however, than both the Host Disk and Virtual Encrypted Disk names are NOT encrypted: they can be seen even before you enter the password to start the encrypted drive.

What if later on you’ve decided that other names would describe your encrypted drive better? You can change both the Virtual Encrypted Disk and Host Disk names by clicking on the Tools button on the Start Virtual Encrypted Disk window:

If you change the Virtual Encrypted Disk name, it takes effect immediately. However, if you change the Host Disk name, you may need to restart the computer before Windows would recognize the new name.

Besides the Virtual Encrypted Disk and Host Disk names, there is a third name that Windows uses to refer to the Virtual Encrypted Disks you create: it’s the labels it shows next to the Virtual Encrypted Disks in the Explorer windows:

Virtual Encrypted Disk label

The default text for the label is “Virtual Encrypted Disk” if you have chosen the NTFS file system for it, or just “ENCRYPTED” if you have formatted it with the FAT file system (because FAT limits the number and kind of characters that can be used in a drive label). USBCrypt itself does not provide a command to change such a label, because Windows itself offers it: you can change the label of an encrypted drive in the same way as of any other drive: by right-clicking on the drive and choosing Properties from the menu:

Changing the Virtual Encrypted Disk label

Enter the desired name there, and the label will change. Unlike the Virtual Encrypted Disk and the Host Disk names we’ve discussed above, the Virtual Encrypted Disk label is encrypted, along with all other data the encrypted disk contains: this label is only displayed by Windows after you’ve entered the correct password to start the encrypted disk.

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USBCrypt 10.8 is out!

Monday, August 30th, 2010

We are excited to announce that a new version 10.8 of our encryption software USBCrypt has been just released and is available now!

This version includes many improvements and fixes, such as:

An option to select the preferred optimization of the Virtual Encrypted Disks: you can now choose whether to optimize for performance or for quick removal of the encrypted disks.
An option to launch the "autorun" process "As Admininstrator" when starting or stopping the encrypted disks.
You can now create custom names for the host disks (other than the default USBCrypt Host disk), to make it easier to recognize different disks in the Explorer windows.
While the encryption process of a drive is in progress, you can now minimize the USBCrypt window to the taskbar. You may find it handly when encrypting large drives.
Also, you can now pause and resume the encryption process, if you need to temporarily allow other programs to use the full CPU power fo your computer.
The built-in backup software that comes with Windows 7 or Windows Vista can now recognize the Virtual Encrypted Disks as valid backup destinations for the documents and settings.
USBCrypt now warns you if you log off or shut down the computer while a disk is being encrypted.
And more! Please give the new USBCrypt a try.

How to password-protect a USB flash drive (video)

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

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Protecting external drives with passwords should not be difficult! Watch this 5 minute video to see how easy it is to protect an external USB flash drive with our encryption software USBCrypt^™.

As you can see, password-protecting a flash drive is easy with the USBCrypt wizard software. When you run it, it guides you through the steps of encrypting a removable USB flash drive. It asks you to choose a name for the encrypted drive (this is optional, but can be handy if you have several similar drives that you use to store different kinds of files):

After a few more steps, which you may want to leave the settings as they are (the defaults should be suitable for most common situations), or you can adjust the options offered by the USBCrypt wizard. For example, you can choose to encrypt the whole drive or only a part of it. You can also select the encrypted file system (FAT or NTFS) to use for the encrypted data. Another option is to choose the encryption strength (such as the 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption in the XTS mode). Yet another option lets you choose whether to create a “spare key” file on your computer, that you could use should you forget you main encryption password:

After the flash drive has been encrypted, you can start it (by entering its password) and it will become accessible via its own drive letter, just as any other drive. To encrypt a file, just move it to the encrypted drive (by, for example, dragging and dropping it using Windows Explorer or with our file manager AB Commander), and the file will be encrypted on-the -fly. To open the encrypted file, you don’t have to do anything special: you can double-click the file on the encrypted drive, as usual, and it will be decrypted transparently for you. When you save the changes, they will be encrypted automatically for you, too. In short, there is no difference between using the encrypted drive and a regular drive!

When you are done using the encrypted files, you need to lock it back. TO do that, you can use the USBCrypt icon in Windows taskbar to stop the encrypted drive:

After the encrypted drive has been stopped, all files and folders it contains become locked with your password again. At this point, you can detach the flash drive from the computer. You can sleep well at night, knowing that your files are safe and sound too.

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What’s included with every license:

30-day Money-Back Guarantee on every software license for up to 5 users or computers. Details…
One Full Year of FREE Upgrades to both minor and major new releases of the same product.
FREE online technical and customer support.
FREE download of the software and FREE delivery of the license key by email.
FREE install on another computer of yours! For example, you can install the software on both your desktop and laptop, without paying anything for the second license. (Business customers get two additional computers included in the license, free of charge.)
Optional CD-ROM is also available.

Posts Tagged ‘usbcrypt’

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