Locking access to the external drives with Folder Guard

Buy Folder Guard:
Personal license $39.95
Business license $79.95

Try Folder Guard free:
Download free trial

Previously we’ve shown how easy it was to set up Folder Guard to prevent downloads of programs from the Internet. As a side effect, the filter that accomplished that task prevented running programs from the removable drives, as well. However, what if you want to stop users of your computer from using the external drives at all? For example, what if you don’t want them to copy documents and files from the computer to the removable drives they could bring with them? With Folder Guard, it’s easy to achieve that.

As before, let’s start by creating a file access filter that would restrict the use of the removable drives. Run Folder Guard, and choose View – Filters from the menu to switch to the window that shows the existing filters. If you use Folder Guard version 8.3 or later, you should see a filter that we need already in the list, it’s called Lock external drives:

If you don’t see this filter in the list, it’s easy to create it: choose Filter – New from the menu, and then enter the properties of the filters as follows:

The most important part of this filter is the content of the Except for folders box: it contains the mask C:* . Why it is there? Because we don’t want the restrictions that this filter would create to apply to the files located on the main drive of your computer (which is most probably the drive C:). We only want the restrictions to apply to other drives, which would have drive letters other than C:. The star character (*) in the mask means any set of characters, so the mask C:* would match any folder located on the C: drive. As a result, the filter would not apply to any file or folder on the C: drive, just what we want.

Did you know you could use our new software USBCrypt to password-protect the USB flash drives and other external drives? You can try it free for 30 days. Read more…

Now, if your computer has other drives permanently attached and you want the users to be able to use such drives without restrictions, you should add the appropriate masks to the Except for folders box, too. (You can separate masks with comas, semicolons, or line breaks). For example, if your computer has a DVD drive that has the drive letter D: and you want the users to use the DVD drive without restrictions, modify the content of the Except for folders box to read as follows: (Press the [...] button to modify the content of the box.)

C:*;D:*

The rest of the filter properties can be left empty. An empty Apply to box means Apply to all and an empty Except for box means Except for none. We have entered a star character in the Apply to files box, to emphasize that it should apply to all files, but we could have left the box empty, it would produce the same result as the star character.

Now that we have created the filter that we need, it’s time to apply a restricting attribute to it. We basically have two choices: the No access attribute and the Read-only attribute. Which one to assign to the filter depends on how exactly you want the external devices to be restricted. If you want to completely lock access to the removable drives, assign the No access attribute to the filter:

The result of the No access attribute would be that the users would be prevented from both opening the files from the external devices, and saving the files to them. If only you want to stop users from saving files to the removable drives, but allow them to open or copy files from them, than the Read-only attribute would do the job:

Attention System Administrators: Folder Guard is enterprise-ready! The Folder Guard Administrator’s Kit is available now.

What if at some point you do need to access a removable drive? Just disable the protection of Folder Guard, perform the task, then re-enable the protection back (no Windows restart required).

More information

Tags: , , , , ,

Leave a Comment:

IMPORTANT! Do not put any URLs in the comment, or it will be rejected. Before submitting, please solve the following simple math (so we know that you are not a spambot) :-)

What is 5 - 3 ?
Please leave these fields as-is: