How to Enable USB Write Protection on Windows

Do you want to restrict someone from writing files from your computer to an external or USB Drive? Fortunately, Microsoft Windows 10/8/7/XP does come with a write protection feature, which will prevent users from copying or writing content from their computer to an external USB Drive.

Every person wants to keep data on their computer safe from unauthorized access. Even though Windows security is robust but in case your access gets compromised, and someone gains access to your system, all your sensitive data on your computer is at risk of getting copied to External Drive.

Many companies use a pervasive approach to protect their data or documents from getting copied by disabling writing to USB drives. In this article, we will see how you can enable USB write protection on your Windows. 

There are two ways that you can disable USB writing on your computer. The first method is a Registry edit trick to enable USB write protection, and the second method is through Group policy editor.

Enable USB Write Protection – Registry Editor:

1. Open the Run dialog box, press Windows Key + R. Type regedit in the Run box and click on the OK button to open Registry Editor.

2. Navigate the following path.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

3. Right-click on Control folder Key, select New and click on Key.

4. Enter new Key name as “StorageDevicePolicies ” and press Enter key.

5. Click on the “StorageDevicePolicies” key, and right-click on the right pane, select New, and click on DWORD (32-bit) Value. Enter the new DWORD name as “WriteProtect ” and press Enter Key.

6. Double Click on the “WriteProtect” DWORD and change its value from to 0 to 1 and click on OK.

DWORD Value = 1    – To Enable USB Write Protection
DWORD Value = 0    – To Disable USB Write Protection

However, the above process is a little cumbersome, because every time you need to change the registry value to change access rights. Therefore, we have created a registry file, which will allow you to enable or disable USB write protection on the Registry Editor just by double-clicking the reg file. Please click on the below link to download the .reg file.

Enable USB Write .reg file download

Disable USB Write .reg file download

Enable USB Write Protection – Group Policy Editor:

if you are not comfortable with modifying the registry then you can try this method to make your USB write-protected.

1. Open the Run dialog box, press Windows Key + R. Type gpedit.msc in the Run box and click on the OK button to open Group Policy Editor.

2. Navigate to Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> System –> Removable Storage Access.

3. On the right pane, double-click on the “Removable Disks: Deny write access” policy.

4. Select the “Enabled” option and click on “Apply” and “OK“.

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