How to prevent copying files to USB drive without disable USB port ?

Today early morning my friend called me for an urgent help. He is working as a network administrator for a small company and he want to disable copying content from working computer to USB drives (pen drives). I told him simply disable the USB port and fix the issue. Then he said according to the company policy he cannot disable USB port and the computer should read files from the USB drive. So in a nutshell he want to read files from the USB drive on his company computers but don't want to copy files from his company computer to the USB drive. He is in a confusion that is it possible to block writing files to the USB drive without prevent reading from it.


I too at first confused with this strange company policy. Then I realize it is very simple to do. We can enable write protection on USB by GP edit or registry edit. I told him to enable write protection on USB in all the working computer and that will resolve the issue. It is very simple to enable write protection on USB ports in registry.

Prevent copy files to USB drive without disable USB

To perform this we need to edit some registry entries. To do this registry edition follow the steps below.


1. Click on start and go to Run

2. Type regedit on run window and click OK

Now the registry editor will be opened. Now follow


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

3. Create a DWORD value called ‘WriteProtect‘ and set it to 1.


To disable write protect on USB drives change the DWORD to 0.