Protect or lock directories on USB external drive?

[thesun]

Wondering if there is an easy tool to lock directories/folders on an external drive that I will be loaning to a friend. It would need to lock for Windoze, Mac, and Linux, as I'm not sure which OS they use.

[DBelton]

not a really good way other than encrypting them.

For one thing, if they hook it up to.. say a windows system, and they sign in as administrator, then they have rights to all files on the drive. Same thing with a linux system. If they sign in as root, then they will have access.

It also depends on what you mean by "lock" directories/folders too. Do you wish to lock it so they have no access? Not even read access? Or just lock it so they can't delete files?

[thesun]

Thanks so much for the reply. That's essentially what I suspected and yes, my hope was to just have a "locked" folder that can't be opened or accessed. In Linux it's easy to do that with permissions and user/group assignments. But they'll probably be in Mac or Windows.

It's an entire /home directory and I like being able to just quickly move files to other computers, so I'd hoped to not encrypt it. But sounds like that's the only choice.

Thanks!!!

[DBelton]

Actually, the most secure method would be to copy your files over to another drive, then wipe that drive and reformat it before loaning it to your friend.

[jpollard]

After all, they can always delete things they don't want - if nothing else than by reformatting it.

[thesun]

No, in my case there's nothing that warrants wiping the drive or any major "security" which is why I didn't want to bother with encryption if there were an easy way to just "lock" a folder. I actually doubt they'll even look in it and if they did it wouldn't be the end of the world but it would have been nice to know they CAN'T. Or couldn't without trying real hard.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. In the end I just copied it to another drive and will copy it back when I've got it back. No biggie.