Everyone knows that you can encrypt your files to prevent others from accessing them without supplying the proper password. For this, there are three types of encryption software generally available – ones that encrypt your files (for example, AXCrypt), the ones that can encrypt the whole disk volume (for example, VeraCrypt) and the ones that create a virtual encrypted disk drive to store your files. The free ioGuard software belongs to the last type – it creates a virtual disk drive, encrypts all the contents of this drive and makes it available only after you supply the correct password.
ioGuard is a portable software that is designed to work only with USB flash disk drives. If you try to launch it from your computer’s hard disk, it will display a message to this fact and close down. You have to copy the ioGuard files to your pen drive and launch it from there to make it work.
On the home screen, the first thing you should do is click on the Settings icon and change the password. This way you will be able to use ioGuard only after supplying the correct password. The next thing you have to do is create a new volume by clicking on the New Volume icon.
You can create a volume of a minimum size of 100 MB and a maximum size of 500 MB (in the paid version, this upper limit does not exist). For further protection, you have to choose another password for this virtual volume disk drive. After this virtual volume disk is created, it is formatted and encrypted and then loaded in the Windows File Explorer.
You can use this virtual volume as you would use any other disk drive – copy files, delete files, move files and more. In the ioGuard interface, you can configure the properties of any virtual disk drive created by this application and change it to read-only, read-write only, make it loadable at a particular time only and so on.
Conclusion: ioGuard is an effective way of storing your private files on your portable USB disk drive. The application as well as the virtual volumes that are used to store the files are both encrypted using a different password making the application very secure.
You can download ioGuard from http://ioguard.com/.