Is that a computer in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
If you are of a certain age you might remember when the 3" floppy was king of off-line storage. They were reliable, sturdy, cheap, just about every system came with a floppy drive as standard and 1.4mb seemed like enough space to hold everything you needed to carry. These days their capacity seems seriously dated and I finally threw out my old floppy disks after having not touched them, except to move them from one office to another, in at least five years.
These days, when CD's capacity seem small and DVD's are cumbersome, no geek travels without at least one USB, flash memory, "thumb" drive in their pocket. Last year a gig was large; now 4, 8 and 16 gig drives are readily available at reasonable prices. But, if you just think of them as updated floppy replacement then you're missing out. This is especially true if you use more than one computer in your work and/or play day. With very little effort a thumb drive can be made into a virtual PC, or applications server at least. You can take your work with you and the applications to run it. You can browse on a strange or temporary PC without worrying about leaving traces of your session behind and having your bookmarks, session settings and passwords all still available to you. You can carry the applications with you to write documents, spreadsheets, websites, databases, to communicate, to edit audio and images and to play music and video all in your jean's change pocket.
Best of all, it's all free! If this sounds appealing them PortableApps.com should be your first stop. It is truly amazing what you can fit on a $20 1gb flash drive and how useful you will find it. The first thing I do when I arrive at work is to pop my battered old thumb drive into the front of my PC and the last thing I do before I turn out the light is to return it to the same pocket. I have then have essentials with me where ever I find myself as long as I have a windows PC available with an open USB port. If I'm working on a review, article or whole website I can immediately pickup where I left off with no fear of getting out of step.
If you only use your thumb drive to pass files around when you can't get a machine on the network you should take a look at Portable Apps and see if it might fit into your way of working. You can still use it as a simple external drive but you can also use it for so much more.
One of the other things I like to put on my thumb drive is the pdf manuals of most of my hardware, especially my camera manuals. The paper manuals often get lost or hard to find as they spread out over my house. I always know where the electronic versions are and I can use the reader's search feature to quickly find what I'm looking for. It's saved me a couple of times when I have forgotten how to use some less common feature of my cameras - just open up the electronic version and search for "mirror lockup" and I'm away. I carry other technical documentation that I need for work in this electronic library so I always have my technical reference library with me.
It also saves me from having to carry a laptop everywhere. I have a PC at work and several at home. The thumb drive has become the conduit and commonality between all these machines. It weighs less than a couple of quarters and doesn't need a battery, power brick or case to be useful. In fact, my old usb flash drive went through the washing machine cycle once and still worked after it was dried off. Try that with a laptop!
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