I recently purchased an external hard drive for my Macintosh. I am running OS 10.2 (Jaguar) and I am trying to figure out if there is a way for me to password protect the external hard drive.
In other words, I would like to set it up so that only I can get access to the external drive. I know that Jaguar lets me set up another user’s account so that he or she can only use certain applications, but will it also let me set up the account so they only have access to certain drives?
If Jaguar doesn’t have this feature, is there some kind of software available that will password protect an external hard drive?
For extra credit, is there any way to restrict access to one partition of the drive, but allow access to anothe partition?
I think the only way to do this is through setting up Users (since that is a big part of why Users exist). There may be third party software that’s out there capable of what you’re looking for.
Is this is kind of along the lines of what you were thinking?:
Also, I’m thinking that if one were so inclined, booting into OS9 might render the drive accessible… so you might need to disable the ability to boot into OS9 for that user, or set up identical users for both OS9 & X…
Since it’s an external drive, the only way to guarantee that no one else will be able to read it will be to guarantee it’s physical security – whatever else you do will render the drive readable on another computer.
Given that, if you have no other computers and only have your single Mac OS X machine without Mac OS 9 installed, you can set up permissions on the drive with Get-Info. If the user can boot into Classic though, there are no permissions enforcement. If the user is an admin user, he or she can disable permissions for external drives – that may be the case for regular users, too, but I don’t think so.
You could also set up encrypted disk images on the external drive. The image file will be readable by anyone and his mamma, but the contents of the image file will be a bunch of encrypted nothingness. This is also a decent possibility if you can’t guarantee physical security for the drive, since whoever steals it won’t be able to decrypt the image files.
I’ve read about drives that have on-board encryption, but I don’t know if they’re available, inexpensive, or if they work with the Mac or USB or Firewire.