Yamira is a USB drive protection tool designed to prevent unwanted modifications to files on USB flash drives in Windows. It provides a simple and effective way to protect USB storage devices from accidental or malicious file changes. The software has an intuitive graphical user interface that displays all connected USB drives, along with essential details such as root directory, device name, file system type, total capacity, and protection status (on or off).
How Yamira Works?
For Yamira’s protection feature to function, the USB drive must be formatted with the NTFS file system. If a drive is formatted with FAT32 or exFAT, the software provides an option to reformat it as NTFS. Users can select a drive from the list and click on the Format NTFS button. Before proceeding, a warning about potential data loss is displayed, ensuring that users are aware of the consequences before formatting.
Once the USB drive is in NTFS format, users can enable protection by clicking Open Protection. This action:
- Makes the root directory of the USB drive read-only by removing write permissions for all users.
- Creates a hidden folder named “TSProtectionSystem” on the drive.
When users want to restore write access, they can select the drive and click Turn Off Protection. This option reinstates write permissions, allowing all users to modify, delete, or add files as usual.
Comparison with Write-Protected USB Drives
Some USB flash drives come with a physical write-protection switch, which mechanically prevents data modification. Unlike Yamira, these mechanical locks work independently of the file system and operating system. However, they have some limitations:
- Not all USB drives include this feature.
- The switch can be fragile and may break over time.
- It provides blanket protection for the entire drive rather than specific folders.
Yamira, on the other hand, offers software-based protection, which is flexible and reversible. It works at the file system level rather than hardware level, making it a useful alternative for USB drives that lack mechanical locks.
Limitations
Yamira require NTFS formatting to enable write protection, which may limit compatibility with certain devices (such as older operating systems and non-Windows platforms). If you write protect your USB drive on Windows 11, this write protection will not work when that drive is accessed using Linux or macOS.
Conclusion
Despite the limitations, Yamira is a practical and effective choice for anyone who wants to secure their USB drives against accidental or malicious modifications. Given that its source code in C# is available on GitHub, developers can also customize it to meet specific needs.
You can download Yamira from https://github.com/turkaysoftware/yamira.