This article explains how to create a read-only USB external disk to securely archive and share family photos and videos.
Abstract: We demonstrate how to set up a read-only USB external drive to safely archive and distribute family photos and videos, protecting them from accidental deletion.
1. Archiving Family Photos and Videos
1.1 The Old Way – Optical Media
For a long time, I was relying on optical media, later years especially on Blu-Ray disks (BD) of capacities of 25GB and 50 GB, since they are cost-effective and of optimal capacity. I really liked their Read-Only property, since they would be passed around and there was a great chance some unskilled user, or even skilled by accident, might delete some irreplaceable old photo.
But, creating Optical BD disks on external devices is slow, and pics archives were not easily accessible since it would require an external BD drive to be attached to the USB port of the laptop/PC to enable seeing the BD disks.
Also, with the creation of more and more videos, a capacity problem started to appear.
1.2 Magnetic Media Degradation Over Time – problem
It’s well known that all magnetic media—including tapes, HDDs, and SSDs—deteriorate over time. While this process can take years or even decades, SSDs are particularly vulnerable: if left unpowered, some can begin to lose data within just six months ([1]). This makes traditional HDDs a more reliable option for long-term storage, especially for important files like family photos.
1.3 External USB HDD
In a previous article ([2]), I described how I repurposed an old 512GB HDD and placed it in a USB-C 3.1 Gen2 enclosure. This drive now serves as my family photo archive.
I created a dedicated archive folder on this external drive:
2 Making the External Disk Read-Only
2.1 Diskpart Tool
I used the Windows diskpart utility to set the partition's attributes to read-only. The process is illustrated below:
2.2 Testing Protection
To confirm the protection, I attempted two actions:
- Deleting a file
- Adding a new file
Here are the results:
2.3 Not Hacker-Proof Protection
This is, of course, only protection from accidental deletion, and can be removed to add/delete more files to the disk, and then reestablished again.
3 Alternatives
I haven’t found a better solution that is both user-friendly and suitable for Windows environments. Some recommend using BitLocker, but that would require sharing a password with users, which defeats the purpose.
Ideally, I would like to see (are you listening, Microsoft?😊 ) an option for a USB drive to be Read-Only for all users, and only require a password to remove Read-Only protection to add/delete files. While such functionality may exist in specialized (and expensive) hardware, it’s not currently standard for typical USB drives.
4 Conclusion
Setting a USB drive to read-only mode is, in my opinion, the best available solution for safely sharing a family photo archive. Still, it's wise to maintain a backup—just in case one of your friends reads this article and figures out how to bypass the protection to delete that one photo where they didn’t look their best. You know what I mean…
5 References
[1] Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds severe data loss and performance issues
[2] Reusing Spare HDDs and SSDs with USB Disk Enclosures
https://markpelf.com/2723/reusing-spare-hdds-and-ssds-with-usb-disk-enclosures/
[3] Free to Set Read-Only Attribute for Disk Partition
https://www.resize-c.com/howto/set-readonly-attribute-for-disk-partition.html