Mac Basics: How to encrypt an external hard disk as a Lion

 



 


 


 


 


 


 


 


FileVault 2 not only encrypts drive internal to your Mac, but it can also encrypt external disks connected via USB and FireWire (and we suspect that you will be able to encrypt external disks connected via Thunderbolt, but the Apple documentation does not specify this). However, external disks must be formatted with HFS +. If you have an external drive that you want to use with Windows and Mac, you must use the FAT file format, and you cannot encrypt it.To encrypt your external drive, you must use disk utility (/ Applications/Utilities) to reformat it. You cannot encrypt a drive that has data on it - which is a major disadvantage if you have a hard disk with a ton of data and you want encrypted. If you want to keep the data, you must save it and then copy to the drive after the fitness.


An important caution: our tests, encrypted external hard drives could not be used on other Macs running Lion and not with older versions of OS X. When we connected a disk encrypted disk Lion utility using a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard, a message appears, indicating that the required drive OS X 10.7.


You want to encrypt your external hard drive? We get through here.To encrypt an external drive, connect it to your Mac, wait it mounts on your desktop, after you put in motion and run disk utility. You will see a left column that lists the storage on your Mac devices. The first is the internal drive. Your external drives should follow. Select the drive you want to encrypt. Then click Delete in the section of the law.


In the menu Format, you will see two new available disk formats, in addition to the standard Mac OS extended (journaled), Mac OS extended (journaled, case sensitive), MS-DOS (FAT), and ExFAT. The new formats are Mac OS extended (journaled, Encrypted) and Mac OS extended (case-sensitive, journaled, encrypted sensitive).


In most cases, you should choose Mac OS extended (journaled, encrypted). The other encrypted format for Mac lets you give files of the same name, but with the treatment of different letter. (For example, the two files named 2011taxes.numbers and 2011Taxes.numbers may exist in the same folder.) You must also provide a name. Click on delete.


A window will appear, confirming that you want to create an encrypted volume. If so, you must enter a password. You must enter this password any time that Mount you the disk, make sure you remember it.Once you enter and confirm the password, click on delete. This will start the process of formatting, this will take several minutes. If you do not want to encrypt the drive, click Cancel.Once the drive is formatted, you will need to enter a password for access. Your files will be automatically encrypted and decrypted. If you unmount the drive, you must enter the password when you try to mount on your desktop. If you enter the wrong password or do not type a, you cannot access the data.In the password entry window, you have the ability to save your password in your keychain. This will allow your reader to ride without the need of your password for that particular Mac stores your keychain. If you try to attach the drive encrypted, say, Mac your friend, who is not your keychain information, you will need to enter a password to access the drive.

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