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I'm working in an office with many people and sometimes I leave my external hard drive with my personal data inside. I would to know if there is some way to see if my hard disk was used during my absence.

I'm not the computer administrator, so I can't use exclusive file permissions and I would really like to know hard disk is opened from another computer. I am using a Mac.

Does exist some other way to protect personal data on usb device like an hard-drive? If yes can you write some link to possible guides?

I hope there is some ploy!!

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Perhaps you should encrypt the contents and password it? – Jasarien Feb 11 '10 at 15:04
maybe, I don't know what I can do, can this be a way to solve my problems? what kind of procedure I should do to encrypt my external hard drive data? – Vittorio Feb 12 '10 at 18:27
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No, there is no way to do this with a standard external hard drive. You can read the drive in read-only mode, then nothing on it will be changed, so there'll be no trace of any access. The drive's hardware could of course log access, but I don't know any drive/enclosure which does that. There are probably "enterprise" solutions for this, but they'll be very expensiv

I would recommend to just encrypt the drive. Truecrypt is probably your best bet (free, secure & cross-platform). Just use whole-disk encryption. See the Truecrypt homepage: http://www.truecrypt.org/ for more info, or look here on superuser.com.

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I like it! thanks for the utility – Vittorio Mar 21 '10 at 10:41
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