If they are encrypted, you don’t have to worry about the data on them being accessible to someone that may have stolen your flash drive or happened to have found it lying around somewhere.Īpple’s Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” and later operating systems make it easy to do a full disk encryption of these flash drives. The reason it’s important to encrypt these flash drives is because these flash drives are usually physically small and can be easily misplaced, lost or stolen. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is how many people put sensitive and personal data on these flash drives but don’t even bother to encrypt them. Like many of my clients and friends, I use a flash drive (also known as a “USB drive” or “Pen drive” or “Thumb drive” etc.), for backing up important files. The original blog entry written for OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” can be found here ) ( NOTE: This was written for OS X 10.12.5 “Sierra.” If you’re looking for the Mac OS 10.11.x “El Capitan” edition, click here. MacOS 10.12.x “Sierra” Edition & 10.13.x “High Sierra” EditionĪ YouTube video of these instructions can be found here ! (if pictures aren't loading select these settings, for Name, leave it as 'UNTITLED', for Format, choose 'MS-DOS (FAT)', then click 'erase'.Encrypting a USB Drive on a Mac Made Easy

(if pictures aren't loading select these settings, for Name, leave it as 'UNTITLED', for Format, choose 'MS-DOS (FAT)', then click 'erase'.) This should be a little dropdown from the actual USB device.Ħ, while selecting the dropdown 'named' drive, click 'erase' and select these settings:

(if pictures aren't loading for you, leave the name as 'Untitled', for the Format choose 'MS-DOS (FAT)', for the Scheme choose 'Master Boot Record')Ĥ, close disk utility and unplug your USB device and then plug in your USB device and launch disk utility in this exact order.ĥ, click the named storage of the USB device. Then click 'erase' format the drive as specified: This tutorial is only to help you correctly format your USB drive, if you get this error message in boot camp assistant: ' format the usb drive to single fat partition'ġ, plug-in your USB device with both ' disk utility' and ' boot camp assistant' closed.Ģ, launch ' disk utility' and find your inserted USB device.ģ, click the USB device. Hello guys, I've found the solution (for users running OS X 10.11.2 (15C50)), however I recommend everyone try this, it could work.

Mac sierra how to format usb drive