First post, by Kerr Avon
Like a lot of people, I use USB drives to back up data nowadays, as they are relatively cheap for the amount of storage space you get, and are very reliable. The problem is that you can't write protect a USB drive to prevent accidental file deletion/formatting/viruses altering the files/etc.
In the floppy disc days, you just engaged the write-protect tab on the disc, and in the CD-R/DVD-R days of course, accidental erasure/formatting was literally impossible*, but now with so many of us using USB hard drives/memory sticks, it's made me wonder if there is a way to prevent data on a USB drive from being altered. I would have thought that special USB leads would be available that have a switch in them to prevent file deletion, but since these don't seem to exist, then I imagine that the solution is more complicated than just disabling a 'write' date lead in the USB cable?
If nothing else, is there software that can do this, even though obviously that will have limited success. But if it at least objects when you (accidentally) try to move data from the USB drive to your PC instead of (as you intended) merely copying the data from the USB drive to the PC, then that would be something. I know, of course, that you can set the 'read only' flag on a per file basis, but I'm hoping for something more effective than that.
Thanks for any answers.
* Combine that with the extremely cheap price per blank disc, and DVD-R would be a superb backup solution, if the 'almost indestructable' sales pitch about CDs in the 1980s and onwards onto the DVD weren't so ridiculously untrue. No matter how carefully DVD-Rs are stored, they seem prone to errors a few years down the line, sadly.
