With bootable USB media becoming more and more common and fewer machines even shipping with a CD drive, ISO image files and other forms of portable software is becoming the new standard for software distributions. To supplement this shift, Rufus aims to convert any ISO image into a boot drive in a matter of minutes.
Rufus is an easy to use portable software for Windows devices to create bootable USB drives using ISO images. This includes options to properly identify images such as installation disks or operating systems and then it will compare the image to the available disk size. The process itself does not take a particularly long time but it does depend on the size of the ISo and speed of the USB drive.
An important note to keep in mind however, the resultant drive is not a USB CD-ROM partition, but simply a bootable device. Additionally, for secure installations such as proprietary operating systems or official paid software, this could be passed to other users without any resistance. At most, a provider could make the drive read-only but even that would not be much of a deterrent.
To remedy this, copy protection software and products such as Lock License drives are available solutions for drive security. With these products, drives can even be locked after the boot USB is completed by Rufus to create a simple and secure two-step distribution.
