Know When a Particular USB Drive Was Last Used On Your Computer

Situation: You work in a shared computer at office or college and doubt that someone else is secretly copying or modifying your files. He may be copying data from the shared computer to his removable USB drive and you might not know whether he actually copied something or not.

One of the solutions to this is disabling write access to USB ports so that the user is not able to write files to the USB disk. The person can view the files kept in his removable drive but can’t copy files to his USB drive.

Another solution to this problem is keeping your important data on a removable drive and never copying or moving it outside. But this is impossible if you have to work with a lot of documents or files having a large file size.

What if you could track the date and time when a USB device was used on the same computer? What if you can know the serial number and name of the USB drive used? Here is a freeware utility which might help.

USDView is a simple portable application for Windows which can be used to view all the USB devices connected to your system. You can also use the application to view all the USB drives connected to the system at an earlier date.

The application shows extended information e.g device name, description, type, serial number, date, time, product ID, vendor ID and more.

This can be very useful when you are sharing your computer with someone else and want to know whether he secretly used a USB drive on your system. The application can perform other useful tasks e.g – running a program when a USB drive in inserted in your computer, preventing autorun of programs from USB drives etc. You can also use USDview on a remote computer, as long as you login to that computer with admin user.

You can generate an HTML report of all the USB devices used in your system and keep the report safe for later use. So the next time you give your laptop to a friend and he says that he didn’t used any USB drive on your system, you can show him the reports.