Encryption options for external USB drive for use w Mac and Windows

The only full drive encryption option I'm aware of which works for both macOS and Windows is VeraCrypt.

https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/VeraCrypt/

If you have a Self Encrypting SSD (SED), then you can use the SSD manufacturer's proprietary software to lock & unlock the SED's built-in hardware encryption feature. Many of them provide software for both macOS & Windows...just make sure it supports the operating systems & computers you want to share the drive. Unfortunately the drive manufacturer's proprietary software may also install an NTFS driver (may not give you the option).

FYI, you still need to make sure to have good backups of any important & unique data stored on the external drive since if you forget the password or the drive is unable to be unlocked for any reason, then you permanently lose access to all data on that encrypted drive.

Aloke wrote:

Thank you for the reply.

WD utility (for selected WD drives) requires the utility to be installed on the Mac/PC to unlock the access to the drive. It does his in a few seconds, so I expect that it is encrypting just the partition table, not all the sectors. One can also remove the password entirely using this utility.

For SSDs, the hardware encryption is built into the SSD so it only takes a second to enable/disable, or to unlock.

For a hard drive, it is hard to say, but again there is a broken method of locking the hard drive that is not really secure.

The downside is that if WD stops making or supporting the utility, (unlikely) then one is stuck. But it is cross-platform.

Yes, that is a concern if you don't keep a copy of the software in case you must ever reinstall it.

What is the difference between using the MacOS's Disk Tools and File Vault? Will any of those work on exFAT and be cross platform? (I don't think so.. but I'll ask anyway).

Those are Apple specific options & you requested cross platform solutions.

While there may be third party software available on Windows to access the macOS only options, do you really want to rely on it working when you need it most? Do you think a third party option is able to be 100% and not cause any data corruption to a macOS specific encryption option? You wanted a cross platform solution. I gave you two cross platform options. Cross platform means it will work with macOS & Windows....in fact both solutions may also work with Linux as well (depends on the external drive though).

There are not very many options. Other options would be to encrypt just a folder or use an encrypted raw image file to store the data, but these also have a lot of drawbacks as well. I'm not familiar with any specifics here.