However, if online isn’t your thing, there are tools like KeePass, which are designed to store your information in a local encrypted database. I happen to use and recommend LastPass, which securely synchronizes your information across all the computers you install it on as well as its own online copy. Honestly, this sounds like a job for a password vault. You mentioned you wanted to save your “websites and passwords”. Nonetheless, it’s a conceptually easy approach using commonly available tools you can find across almost all platforms.

It’s also easy to accidentally leave that unencrypted copy around, or leave traces of it even after you delete it. You then need to manually re-encrypt it any time you make changes to its contents. The downside is that in order to use the contents of the file, you need to manually unzip it to create an unencrypted copy of the file. Zip files can be password-protected to encrypt their contents (though not the list of files within the zip file). The most common way to do this is to use a zipping utility, like 7-Zip, WinZip, or Windows’ own built-in zip file support. Rather than encrypting and password-protecting the entire disk, another approach is to encrypt only the files containing the sensitive information. How Do I Encrypt a Disk? has step-by-step instructions for both BitLocker and VeraCrypt.

The advantage is that VeraCrypt is not limited to Windows, so in theory, your drive would be portable to other systems. Windows has BitLocker, which can be used to encrypt an entire drive with a password.Īnother approach is to use a tool like VeraCrypt to perform whole-disk encryption. Whole-disk encryption is an approach that encrypts the entire disk drive, be it a USB thumb drive or an internal hard disk. One way or another, encryption is the answer. Use a tool dedicated to the task, such as a password vault.

Purchase a device with built-in protection.

Password protected usb drive