Featured Freeware: Rohos Mini Drive

USB drives are simple to carry, but easy to misplace, and that can be risky when it comes to sensitive information. Rohos Mini Drive is a freeware app that safeguards personal documents by creating a password-protected partition on your flash drive. The download actually installs two programs: one, Rohos Mini Drive, is the partition manager that self-installs as a portable app on the drive when you create the partition; the second, Rohos Disk Browser, is a portable file manager, which can be useful when the encrypted partition can't be read by the host computer.

Operating Rohos Mini Drive is fairly straightforward. Plug in your portable drive and start the program. You should see three choices: Set up USB flash drive, Change password, and Options. Setting up the drive requires choosing a password--that's it. Depending on the size of the drive, creating the partition should happen reasonably quickly. Once the partition has been created, you can change the disk size and partition drive letter. The Rohos Disk Browser displays and manipulates items in the protected partition. Single-click functions include opening, saving, deleting, and displaying file properties. Searching and opening the partition is also easily selected from a short pull-down menu.

Rohos Mini Drive includes features to open the protected drive on systems where the user doesn't have administrator rights. That makes this app easy to use anywhere, from public library labs to your best friend's system.