Originally posted by: badbilly27
I have hard drive that I need to make an exact copy of and give to a friend. However, I want to lock the hard drive so he can't go and make additional copies of it. Is this possible? If so how?
Thanks in advance all
Question - is this friend, going to be actively using this HD, or only just storing it for you? (Your off-site backup, perhaps?)
If the person needs access to the HD's contents, then there is no way to prevent them from being able to copy it. If you can read it, you can copy it.
If the person doesn't actually need to access the HD's contents, then you could potentially encrypt it's contents, before giving it to your friend. Of course, you would retain the "key", or distribute it to another, different, trusted friend, for safekeeping.
One way to do this automatically, would be Abit's "Secure IDE" product. It fits in-between a HD and an IDE device cable, and has a removable "key" unit, that contains the encryption/decryption key information.
What you could then do, is using a disk-imaging product (such as Ghost, or TrueImage), make an identical copy of your current HD, to this backup HD, through the encrypted Secure IDE product.
When done, just give your friend the HD, and without the key, the contents are unreadable to them. Of course, technically, they *could* copy it, but since they would be encrypted, they would likely do them no good.
