Protect Files on USB drive from deletion?

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good morning all,

my company recently purchased 200 4gb usb memory drives that we are loading with our company information and literature

the files we are putting on the drives are approximately 1.4gb, so that leaves quite a bit of space left over

I want to know if there is any way to protect the folder these files are in from deletion, I still want them to be able to be read, and seen, just don’t want them deleted

I have tried doing this by setting them read-only, but that still allows them to be deleted

I see, through the security setting that I can make changes to the permissions on the files, but I cannot see how to do this for any user but myself, and on any other computer

does anyone have any suggestions?

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You can make them “Read Only” but that is not very hard to change back.
But I doubt that they can be made made permanently unreadable without making the whole drive “Read Only”.
This can be done but you will need a “special” drive with a temporary override to get your data on the drive or maybe have the manufacturer add it for you.

But then instead of having your customers reuse it with your logo, it would get tossed in a drawer or circular file and never see the light of day again. YMMV 🙂

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If you have permissions in your security tab, that means the drive is NTFS.
Highlight the folder and you should be able to add the user “Everyone” and give it full control. Then, click the “Advanced” button, highlight Everyone and click Edit. You should be able to uncheck the “Delete”, “Change Permissions” and “Take Ownership” boxes. Choose to apply the setting to all files and subfolders. Then no one (not even you) can remove the folder.

After all that work, your customers will simply reformat the drive and use it to store pictures of their cat.

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After reading this thread all the way through, several times, I still come up with the same answer…..

“Keep your Flash Drive away from prying eyes or meddling hands”. Eh?

The Doctor 😎

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More information:

http://www.fencepost.net/2010/03/usb-flash-drives-with-hardware-write-protection/

Some USB drives have a write-protect switch on them. I wonder, if you removed the switch, would they be permanently read-only?

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I have one solution to your problem if you just want to prevent users deleting the files in flash drives. You can use the Kakasoft USB copy protection software to lock files in the flash drives and then prohibit copy, paste, modify permissions, and then users can only view files or run programs in drive, and the protected files in it are not allowed to be deleted. But there’s a problem for this software. It can only protect files from being copied, modified or deleted, but can’t prevent the flash drive from formatted.
Hope it’s helpful to you.

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This looks like something you would want:

http://www.premiumusb.com/usb-datalock.aspx

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I am not a promoter of this company, but we did this same thing and used a company called iPromo at ipromo.com…. They did for us exactly what you’re needing to do – Lock files from being deleted but not from being viewed. In fact, they even split the flash drives into 2 partitions – One that was locked from deletion and the other was free space for customers to use for saving their own files. They even printed our logo on the flash drive itself.

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