Posted on February 4, 2010
Tom Settel
Apricorn’s Aegis Vault provides a way to transport your files without risking that they fall into the wrong hands. This portable drive features 128-bit AES encryption and password protection.
The Aegis Vault comes with software for managing the drive and granting user permissions. The first program is Vault-Tray, which lets you create one administrator account and up to three user accounts, each with a unique password. VaultTray also lets you access your encrypted drive by typing your password. The second program is VaultResize, a utility that lets you reallocate the drive’s encrypted partition. With this utility, it’s possible to create both publicly accessible and private, encrypted partitions. Finally, Apricorn includes the third program, VaultConsole, which lets you access your encrypted files when you are using a computer that doesn’t have VaultTray installed. You can either carry VaultConsole on a separate disc or install it on the public portion of the Aegis Vault drive.
There were a couple of small quirks during installation and setup. First, the drive didn’t power up on the first system on. However, the drive did work when used the bundled USB Y-cable, which Apricorn says is rarely necessary to use the drive. The second problem was that launch VaultResize if first closed VaultTray; otherwise, an error message and the program wouldn’t start.
It was simple to set up the administrator and user accounts through VaultTray, and VaultResize was equally intuitive for creating an encrypted partition. Once you create the encrypted partition, you can use Windows Disk Management to format the public partition.
The Aegis Vault is available in 80/120/160/250GB capacities and is compatible with Windows 2000/XP/Vista. The Vault’s size and security features make it an excellent option for transporting files between systems.
Tags: Online Storage, Server Storage
