Simply plug your important documents into the Portable Safe. The Portable Safe virtual drive works like another hard drive in your computer, with the difference that your data is stored in it securely encrypted.
Portable Safe allows you to transport data safely and securely. You can set up a Portable Safe on any USB storage device (e.g. USB flash drive, USB hard drive) or burn it to optical media such as CD or DVD.
In case of loss of the storage device, unauthorized third parties cannot access your data because of the encryption of the Safe file.
When you set up the Portable Safe, the necessary software is automatically installed on the storage device.
To create a Portable Safe, first click on the "+" icon in your Steganos Data Safe program.
Then please click on the Portable Safes option.
Now select the desired drive. Safes that you create on CDs, DVDs or Blu-rays can only be used for one-time secure storage of your data and cannot be modified later.
Next, please choose the name for your Portable Safe.
Now please choose the desired size for the Safe. Please note that creating a Safe on slow drives or drives that are only connected via USB 2.0 can take a relatively long time and in such cases choose a size as small as viable for the Safe.
In the following step please enter the desired password for the Safe. It should be as long and complex as possible, because the security of the Safe's encryption strongly depends on how good your chosen password is. We recommend at least 20 characters and a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers as well as special characters. Ideally, you should create the most secure password possible with the password generator and keep it in a safe place or store it in Steganos Password Manager, for example.
Then the Portable Safe is created. Depending on the size of the Safe and the possible write speed to the target drive, this process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. To get a rough estimate of the time needed, you can simply divide the size of the Safe by the average write speed of the drive. For example, in the case of this screenshot, 5120 MB divided by ~500 MB/s gives about 10 seconds. However, for 1 TB Safe size, it would already be 35 minutes. With slower drives like hard disks it can take much longer.
If the Safe is created successfully, please select the desired drive letter and click "Next".
Your Portable Safe will then be opened so that you can transfer the desired data into it. Just click "Show Portable Safe Drive" to open the Safe drive in Windows Explorer, and then copy the data you want to back up to that drive. Once everything is copied, click "Next" to close the Safe.
After your Portable Safe is closed, you will see an explanation of how to use it. Click "Finish" to complete the creation.
Please note that a Portable Safe will NOT appear in the main overview in your Steganos Data Safe. To use it, open the drive where the Portable Safe is stored and click on the usbstarter.exe there, which has the name of your Safe.
If you want to move your Portable Safe to another drive later, be sure to copy both the usbstarter.exe and its folder! The .exe only contains the program to open the Portable Safe, the actual Safe and other required components are located in the associated folder. Without this folder, you will not be able to access your Portable Safe.
You can also create multiple Portable Safes on the same drive. However, please make sure that you give different names to each Portable Safe.
