Creating a Read-Only USB Disk for Archiving Family Photos

Mark Pelf
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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 relied on optical media, later years especially on Blu-Ray disks (BD) of capacity 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.

However, creating an Optical BD disk 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, capacity problems 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.

USB HDD

I created a dedicated archive folder on this external drive.

External drive

2. Making external disk Read-Only

2.1. Diskpart tool

I used the Windows disk part utility to set the partition's attributes to read-only. The process is illustrated below.

Diskpart tool

Check Status

2.2. Testing protection

To confirm the protection, I attempted two actions.

Deleting a file
Adding a new file

Here are the results.

Result

Error

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 USB drives 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.