Stories of vanishing items are not relegated to fairy tales today. A poof! can actually work for your own system. Ever wished you could simply make your important files vanish? Well, it’s as easy as moulding clay. For anyone who maintains important information, data security will always remain vital to them. Irrespective of whether it is personal or official, the craving to keep it confidential will prevail. It is inevitable that the more we know about theft, the more restless we are to keep our data safe. Today, we have numerous data protection software available in the market that can secure your file/folder or even a drive by assigning passwords. We have all tried securing some of our MS Word documents atleast at some point in the past.

Thinking from an organizational point of view, there are several threats that we face in our day to day work life. From the time you enter the office till the time you swipe your card to confirm you are exiting, Data theft always tops the chart. Let it be a theft from the HR repository taking away all your contact information, or from a finance shared location that may leak sensitive information about the company. It may also be the PM’s dump that may reveal upcoming deals for the company!

Protecting data with a password or by hiding the folder and changing its properties is common practice. All of us use this to ensure that crucial data is not left in the open and, in turn, made usable. This is further strengthened by ensuring your computer is locked once you are off your seat and also by keeping track of who and what is shared over the network and who can access what. While all these are pretty much in practice, the anti-party has everything ready as well to fight and get sensitive information out of your box.

Disappear the drive! In this tug of war, something has been in existence for a long time now but is still not very common. That is, having your drives disappeared! What exactly do we mean? ‘Disappear’ here means that the drive will not be listed anywhere – let it be Windows Explorer or your favorite My Computer. The file cannot be accessed with a command prompt and it will not be visible in the Safe Mode either. The drive will absolutely not be counted anywhere. This ensures you are religiously able to safeguard sensitive data that needs to be secured securely.  

How to do it? Good things don’t come easy. This requires some modification in registry and some calculations are required to create the respective drive. The following key needs to be modified to create a drive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.  This is done by using “Regedit” command from Run and creating a new DWORD Value in machine’s registry (under Explorer) by name of “NoDrives”.  There are numbers designated for different drives that should be used as a value for the newly created key in registry (you need to check MS site for these numbers).  Say 16 is the value for drive E:, putting this value for newly created DWORD registry key will hide the E: from your computer. Interestingly, if multiple drives are to be hidden, the values for those two drives could be added and put in the registry DWORD key to make it happen – say 84 (16+32) will hide both E: and F:.  Once the machine has been restarted, the changes take effect. This process works equally well for mapped drive (though it can always be done by disconnecting them).  The only catch here is that you cannot use this technique to hide your C: as Windows uses that drive for operational purposes.  

Finally, when you need to show the drive, simply delete the key from registry. A certain degree of caution is required when updating (creating/deleting) the registry entry to ensure proper working of machines. Therefore, taking a backup before attempting is always advisable. No matter what we do, the chances of data theft are always there. How critical is the data and how much you can attempt to secure are directly proportional. Nevertheless, hiding drives is worth attempting in case of sensitive/crucial data that needs some shelter in your machine.