Lend a Drive Without Handing Over Your GPS History

The same feature that makes a drive recognizable anywhere — a hidden catalog written onto the drive itself — has an obvious downside: hand that drive to a family member, or lose it, and whoever has it also has a GPS-tagged record of everywhere you've been for years. MediaVault treats that as a real problem, not a footnote.

Per-drive, not all-or-nothing

Every drive's privacy settings are its own — disable the portable catalog entirely on a drive you're about to lend out, or keep the catalog but strip GPS from it specifically, without changing anything about how your other drives behave.

The local mirror still knows everything

Turning off or stripping a drive's portable catalog doesn't erase what MediaVault already knows on your own machine — it only changes what travels with the physical drive itself, which is the actual thing you can't control once it leaves your hands.

It's a small settings toggle for a real risk: the same portability that makes MediaVault convenient is exactly what makes a lost or borrowed drive worth thinking about before you hand it over.