Is there a way to firewall protect the drives

[Wxman]

I have the drives in an external Probox setup, and I was wondering if there was any way to protect them from attacks such as ransomware? I have antivirus, anti malware, etc., and windows firewall, but what I was thinking is a way to firewall the programs that access to the drives. The data on the drivepool drives is only media that has a select group of programs that use it.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Do mean making the disks read only, or blocking access to modifying the disks? 

 

 

The simplest option may be to remove the drive mount points.  Meaning that they have no drive letter.  Optionally, you could mount the drives to a folder location, but that wouldn't be as "secure". 

 

Many programs require a drive letter or folder mount point to access the drives.  However, this isn't strictly required/secure, as many programs (including StableBit DrivePool) can access the drives via the Volume ID.

 

 

Another option is setting the disks as read only. This means that you WILL NOT be able to write to the pool at all, but may make it secure for static data. 

 

This is a bit more tricky, as it requires using the "Diskpart" utility. 

list disk
select disk #
attrib disk set readonly
exit

Replace the "#" with the disk in question, this MUST be an underlying disk, and not the pool disk. 

Repeat the second and third lines for each disk.  

 

This will set the entire disk as read only. This means that no data can be changed, the drive can't be formatted, and the partitions can't be altered. 

 

Just remember that if you want to edit contents or add new files, you'll need to clear the read only flag on the disks ("attrib disk clear readonly"). 

[Wxman]

Do mean making the disks read only, or blocking access to modifying the disks? 

 

I think what started me thinking about this was reading about the increase of ransom ware showing up. I protect all our computers as well as I can, and back up as much as possible. So far, I haven't set up much back ups for all the media files, just because I can't make up my mind which ones to do. I have too many to really back up them all. But in thinking about this, I started wondering if someone has a connected drive pool like I do, if there was a way to protect it from something like a ransom ware attack. The way I have mine set up is all the drives in the pool showing as my 'L' drive.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

To be blunt, after losing a series of disks in rapid succession, backup everything.  It may be simple to redownload/re-rip, but it may take hours, days, or weeks to rebuild everything.  

 

As for the ransome-ware stuff, setting the disks as "read only" would definitely work.