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Hi, I'm a PGCE student teacher (*avoids rotten fruit*) and I am wondering if a hardware encrypted USB stick is the best thing for my needs at the moment and if it works how I think it does - if so, I'm open to suggestions! Basically, I use four main computers - my personal laptop, my desktop at my desk in the staff room, my desktop on my classroom desk, and a multitude of desktop computers on the two days I am at university rather than on teaching practice. I have a lot of files, and work on them a lot. It has got to the point where managing them/managing access to them is becoming a hassle. At home, I use Dropbox installed on my personal laptop - this works fine at home, but the client is not installed on any of the computers at university or at my placement college - instead I have to manually download the files from the web interface, make any changes, save them and then reupload using the web interface. This is too much faffing about - it works fine for simply viewing files made elsewhere, but the web interface isn't great when actively working on them, and I quite often open them from a work PC using the web interface and make any changes on the computer there, click save, and then forget to re-upload it to Dropbox after saving - d'oh - meaning I have a 'stranded' copy left on a work or uni PC that I can't get to, and a separate one in my Dropbox folder. So, Dropbox is out. Google Drive is out for the same reason. And OneDrive is also out. (None of the work or uni PCs have Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive clients installed, meaning I have to use the web interface on those computers - see above for issues associated with that!). I asked both my uni and my placement college IT Services about remote access to filestorage there, thinking I could just set it up so I can access my work storage via a mapped drive from my laptop, easy right? Except neither of them have anything set up to do this - and instead I was told by my college to use a USB stick instead. I don't like USB sticks for obvious reasons - 1) them getting lost/forgotten 2) them breaking 3) security issues. So what I was thinking is continue using Dropbox as my primary storage (in case I lose or break the USB stick) and buy a USB stick for my "work in progress" files (a second copy of them I mean, they will also be backed up locally), so I can save everything I'm actively editing on to the USB stick and access and work on them from any PC, then just copy the final version(s) to Dropbox and my work storage areas once I'm finished. Sounds good... But there's still the security issues associated with USB sticks, which got me looking at encryption. Software based encryption won't work as I can't install software on work or uni PCs, only my own laptop. I found out there is something called hardware encrypted USB sticks and was wondering if this was a possible solution? How do they work - do they need any software installing or running? I'm not sure if I'll be able to run software from off the USB stick, even if it doesn't need installing on the PC, due to Group Policy restrictions So I am hoping there is a magic hardware encrypted USB stick out there that works with any PC and does not require running OR installing software?!?! Am I dreaming? If one exists, please offer suggestions - it needs to be 16gb or above to match my current USB stick! If one doesn't exist... please help... I will not be using an insecure USB stick, but I am also hating my current method which seems to take ages trying to work out which file is current etc!

Hi I hope somebody can help, I am having this strange issue with mapped drives on windows 7 where the drives just don't show. My domain controller runs server 2012 R2 and the drives are pushed out through group policy to windows 7 x64 machines. The only drive that shows when I log on as a staff/student user is their home drive but they should get 4 more drives such as a P:\ drive for software. However when I click a shortcut to some software on the P:\ drive the software opens fine and suddenly the drive appears. It's almost like the drives are hidden but there is nothing I can see in the policy set to hide them. Thanks in advance!