Kingston Data Traveler Locker + G3 (DTLPG3/16GB) USB 3.0 Personal Data Protection with Automatic Cloud Backup, Silver

This is an absolute gem. Strong, sturdy, good looking and easy to set up.It allows you to protect information on your USB from prying eyes. Takes no more that a few minutes to set up. I like the way you can have a password from 6 characters to 16 using their criteria of upper case/lower case/numerals and symbols.All these elements must be used in the password.thus making it very powerful protection for your sensitive information.You can use a hint as well as contact information, which you can change or delete at any time.I'm using Windows 10 and haven't encountered any problems.Kingston have always had a good name, and this quality product is no exception.Had it for a while now...just love it.Highly recommended.

Since Truecyrpt died out, I had been searching for a cross platform (Windows and Mac) on the fly encryption program so I can carry my files around encrypted.There isn't to much information on the encryption methods or security but certainly for a basic encryption, it works fine (if I lost the USB, your average Joe wouldn't be able to get at my data).To me, it makes a nice compromise to using the cloud.Load the program, put your password in and off you go - simple. Pretty sure it won't work on Linux or a Chromebook, but then it's not stated as working on such. Speed wise, it performs pretty quick for a USB3 drive but is slowed down by the encryption. Also, it can get quite warm after sustained writing to the drive (wrote 10GB of data to it and it was fairly warm after).Overall, good quality product that works as it should.

Solid construction. Built of sturdy materials and clearly a premium product. The encryption works in a bit of a strange way: when plugging in the USB, it first mounts drive that Windows 10 recognises as a DVD-R/RW drive. Auto-launch did not immediately launch the authentication application. I had to navigate to the drive and click on the authentication application and set up my password. Once that was done a second USB-drive gets mounted which is the encrypted drive. Annoyingly the USB-2-Cloud feature, which apparently can back up your files to a cloud storage account is packaged together with the drive. This is initially a free trial account, but you have to pay to continue using it after 1 month, which is very misleadingly advertised. I would class this as bloatware, rather than a feature. Lastly, why would you want to back this drive up to the cloud, where the files will then exist in an unencrypted form within the file structure? I bought this drive for the sole purpose of downloading sensitive data that cannot live on a cloud-based server and keeping that data safe.

It's difficult to review USB memory sticks. It's not as if they all have vastly different methods of solving the basic requirement of data storage. However for this one I'll go out on a limb and say it's the best-balanced combination of features I've encountered from any memory stick.LOOKS: I'd still give it second-place in this regard to its Kingston stable-mate, the Data Traveler SE9, which I also own. The latter item is the most beautiful USB stick ever. It's like a piece of modern sculpture. However this Locker G3 is much more stylish item than the shoe-box of the Kingston Data Traveler Ultimate G3 (which I also own). That one is a really ugly lump of memory! This Locker G3 is metal, every so-slightly roughened surface, and feel just the right finish and weight. There is also a hole at the end of the body which I have inserted a small split-ring (much smaller than typical key-ring size) with a stub lanyard attached. Overall I'm very happy to be seen in public with this!PERFORMANCE: Beautiful as the SE9 is (did I mention that?) it is pretty slow. This is a very much better unit for speed. I've made no attempt to generate pointless benchmarks of MB/s transfer times - they really don't relate to real-life usage. However I do have a bunch of portable apps with a launch menu stored on my Locker G3 and I can happily run a file manager, browser, text editor etc all from the device itself. I've installed LibreOffice Portable on it,and while the initial launch takes several seconds, thereafter usability is absolutely fine.SECURITY: Very pleased indeed to have this option. As yet I've no way of verifying how secure and robust the encryption system is, but the sooner all manufacturers of USB sticks treat this as a standard feature the better as far as I'm concerned. None of my existing USB sticks (did I mention I have quite a few?) has any form of security built-in. Unlocking the device is a simple process when you plug it in - just a few seconds. The security software has even survived me shutting down the PC without quitting the app first. And it started perfectly next time. So far, very happy.VALUE: Given all the positives above, plus the good 32GB capacity, from a reputable manufacturer, I think a price in the £20-£25 range is very good value for money. It's even come down in price by a couple of ££ since I bought mine, but I still think I bought it at a good price so I'm happy.OVERALL: Can't suggest any reason why you wouldn't want to own one of these. Go get it now.