To stop other people from altering data on your USB devices or to prevent unintentional data loss or overwriting on the USB, you can activate write protection on the USB drive. Below are four methods to achieve this. If you need to recover deleted or lost files from a USB flash drive, memory card, computer, external hard drive, MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a free tool that can help.

To enable write protection on USB flash drives, pen drives, etc., you can use the following four methods.

Method 1. Set USB to Read-only Using Diskpart

Step 1. Press Windows R, type cmd, press Ctrl Shift Enter, and click Yes in the User Account Control window to open an elevated Command Prompt.

Step 2. Type diskpart in the Command Prompt and press Enter to open the Diskpart window.

Step 3. Next, type list disk in Diskpart and press Enter. Review the list of detected disks and identify which one corresponds to your USB drive.

Step 4. Type select disk * command, and press Enter. Replace “*” with the disk number of the USB drive.

Step 5. Type attributes disk command and press Enter to check the attributes of the USB drive. If the USB is not already read-only, type the command attributes disk set read-only and press Enter to enable write protection on the USB.

If the current state of the USB device is read-only, you can type the command attributes disk clear read-only, and press Enter to remove write protection on the micro SD card or USB.

Method 2. Modify the USB Drive's Security Permissions

Step 1. Right-click the USB drive in the File Explorer window and select Properties.

Step 2. For NTFS drives, click the Security tab and then click Edit. In the Permissions window, you can click Everyone under Group or user names. To set the USB drive to read-only for everyone, uncheck all the boxes under Allow except for the Read option.

For FAT drives, click the Sharing tab and then click Advanced Sharing. Click Share this folder and then click Permissions. Click Everyone and uncheck all boxes under Allow column except for the Read option.

Method 3. Enable Write Protection on USB Through Registry

Note: Editing the Windows Registry carries risks. It is strongly recommended that you back up your Windows system and important data before making any changes using MiniTool ShadowMaker.

Step 1. Press Windows R, type regedit in the Run dialog, and press Enter to open the Registry Editor in Windows 10.

Step 2. In the Registry Editor window, navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control.

Step 3. Right-click the Control key and click New -> Key to create a new key and name it StorageDevicePolicies.

Step 4. Right-click the newly created StorageDevicePolicies key and click New -> DWORD (32-BIT) Value. Name the created value as WriteProtect.

Step 5. Double-click the WriteProtect value and set its value to 1. This will enable write protection on the USB flash drive, and others will receive a "This disk is write-protected" message when attempting to modify the content on the USB.

To disable the write-protection on the USB, follow the same instructions above and set the value from 1 to 0.

Method 4. Enable Write Protection on USB Via Group Policy

Note: Editing the Windows Group Policy also carries risks. You can back up your Windows system and important data before making any changes.

Step 1. Press Windows R, type gpedit.msc in the Run box, and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor in Windows 10.

Step 2. Navigate to: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Removable Storage Access.

Step 3. Double-click the Removable Disks: Deny write access policy in the right window, and select Enabled. Click Apply and then click OK to save the changes. You may be prompted to restart your computer. This will make the USB device read-only.

Best Free Way for USB Device Data Recovery

If you accidentally delete some files on the USB, don't worry, you can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to easily restore the deleted or lost files from the USB, computer, memory/SD card, external hard drive, etc. for free.

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