One can sometimes forget to remove a portable hard drive from a PC before shutting it down. This may result in theft of the USB or External Drive, if you leave it plugged into a public computer, or you may be unable to extract your data in a timely manner. For example, if you forget your USB plugged into an office computer, you might not be able to use the documents saved in it, when you come back home.
USB Guard is a portable software, which blocks system shutdown if a USB or External Hard Drive is plugged in. It shows a message explaining that you still have a portable drive plugged into the computer. You can then plug out the USB and shutdown, hibernate or put the system into standby mode, by using the options given by USB Guard.
Once USB Guard is launched, it works from the system tray and monitors the presence of portable drives. You can enable USB Guard to auto start with Windows and monitor the presence of all local and portable drives, from the system tray menu.
Note: USB Guard can only detect external hard drives if they are plugged after the it has been started. Therefore, make sure that you start USB Guard before plugging in an External Drive or enable auto run option from system tray menu. If USB Guard has not started before you plugged in a External Drive, then you can select the drive manually from the menu using “monitor the presence of these drives” option.
USB Guard works on the following Windows operating systems:
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista
- Windows 7
