ANTICOPY PERSONAL EDITION

Armed with USB storage device, a PDA, a CD or DVD drive, or a FireWire storage device, anyone can steal data. VolumeShield’s AntiCopy Personal Edition 2.5 tries to prevent such hardware from connecting to your PC without authorization. The company hopes you’ll like this free version and will tell the boss to get the Enterprise release. That could be a career-limiting move.

Except for the boot drive, upon installation AntiCopy blocks access to every drive it can control even additional internal ones. Worse, after asking for your Windows log-in credentials to authorize access, it fails to say which drive you’re authorizing. Alarmingly, during testing, the utility also spontaneously disabled my authorized additional drives, refusing to relent. Only a reboot restored access.

Unlike its competitors, AntiCopy fine-tunes device ID by using a drive’s volume label, so changing the label revokes authorization. And although the app can block access to CD and DVD drives, it can’t do the same with floppy disk drives or media cards. Repeatable errors I got during testing and a severe vulnerability. This app costs nothing and provides little more