With the Victorinox Secure product, you have a tool for creating secure, virtual drives that can only be opened using the right password or fingerprint. These drives are encrypted using AES 256 and considered very secure.
The actual storage space for these virtual drives is located on your USB stick, however, is displayed by Windows like a completely normal drive. Once a drive has been started, you can use it with Windows as if you had an additional drive.
Please keep in mind that even virtual drives require real storage. This storage is located on the USB stick under the Virtual Drives directory. Later, you will find files in this folder with “xsvd” extensions. Each of these files reserves physical storage space for each virtual drive. If you were to delete one of these files then you would also be deleting the corresponding encrypted drive and consequently all of the data stored in it would then be gone.
Creating a Drive
To create an encrypted, virtual drive, you first specify the name of the drive in the entry field.
Of course, the password for this new drive should not be forgotten. Please try to use passwords, which you will be able to remember, but which should also be “secure”. If you forget your password, you will no longer be able to access the data on that drive. During application development, we specifically avoided these types of features for reasons of security.
The specification of the size of the new drive should be determined carefully in advance. If you want to use this drive for lots of images or other large files then it should be significantly larger than if you wanted to primarily secure text documents. The minimum size is 3 MB. The maximum is only limited by the space available on the USB stick.
Please note that all of the storage space that you allocate for this new secure drive is immediately reserved, even when the drive itself is still empty.
Example: If you were to create an 8 GB drive on a USB stick that had previously indicated 10 GB free, then after the creation of the drive only 2 GB would remain available, even if the encrypted drive were still empty.
Caution: In order to create a secure drive, we recommend not using the option “Use Fingerprint/Master Password”.
Use a different password than the Master Password with a minimum of 7 characters or more.
Of course, encrypted drives can also be stored on a hard disk. To do this, set the checkbox (indicated by the red circle) and subsequently an little icon will appear after Destination Directory. By default, the file made available for the encrypted drive is stored in the Windows user directory under “\AppData\MKI\Secure Drives”.
You can then determine a different location for this file using the icon. Clicking on the folder icon opens a selection dialog.
After you have selected all your settings and checked them, the new drive will be created when you click the Create button. Depending on the size, this may require anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes. As this process is running, the yellow progress bar will move towards the right until it reaches 100%.
Depending on the size of the encrypted drive that you create, this may require anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. The amount of time required depends not only on the size of the drive, but also on the computing power of your computer.
After the drive has been successfully created, it will appear in the list of virtual drives under Add Encrypted Drive.
From this screen, you can now set the options for any drive which has already been created as you would like.
Starting a Drive
To start a drive, you must select it from the list of drives using the mouse, enter the corresponding password in the password field, and click the Open Drive button.
After the drive has been successfully started, it should also be listed under My Computer. You can now use this drive as if it were your own hard disk. However, you should also keep in mind that you have to close the drive before removing the USB stick.
Closing a Drive
The best approach to closing an open drive would be to select the corresponding drive from the Encrypted Drives screen and then click the Close Drive button.
Deleting a Drive
When encrypted drives are no longer needed, you may delete them… To do this, select the corresponding drive in this list and use the Delete Drive button.
