The left navigation bar will change, looking like the picture on the right. With Disk Utility opened, navigate to the top of the window and click the “View” dropdown menu. Formatting on Mac will occur at the beginning of the process so don’t lose your data! Step 1: Disk Utility and the Correct Viewįor Mac, the majority of external drive settings take place in the Disk Utility application. Do this before you perform any function on the flash drive. However, the first step you should take, regardless of your operating system, is to guarantee that whatever data you have on the drive you are encrypting is backed up.

If you are looking for the Windows guide, click Here. The process is different on Windows 10/11 and Mac. You won’t be able to do anything with the flash drive without that password. When you encrypt a drive, software access to the flash drive is limited because a password blocks users from read and write permission.

The best reason to encrypt a drive is safety to secure your data. Fortunately, it is very easy to encrypt a flash drive on Mac compared to Windows. This article will help with encrypting a flash drive on Mac in 4 easy steps.

Encrypt external drive