USB Flash Drive

Computer Backup in your pocket

USB Flash Drives have got to be a candidate for this past decade's "best thing since sliced bread" award. They are inexpensive, reliable, compact and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes (both literally and figuratively).

Sometimes known as USB Pen drives, any PC running Windows 2000 or above can easily use these devices. Windows 95 can just about forget it, and Windows 98 can usually do it with a driver available from many manufacturers website.

Not only cheap, FREE!

Common uses of USB flash drives

• Probably the most common usage of these devices is to transport data. Whether a holdover from the old "sneakernet", carrying data from one PC to another or from client to vendor and vice versa. (A CPA firm I consult for has replaced Zip disks and the hassle of CD writing with these drives.)

• With the size of these drives, and with cost at or near zero, they make great computer backup devices. Backup data, on a rotating basis, and take it home or to a bank vault - even the fireproof safe (note: data fireproof, not just paper fireproof).

• Make your data transportable. With so many portable apps these days, and websites devoted to offering those apps, you can take just a secure USB flash drive with you to a public or other shared PC and do some work with your browser, bookmarks, etc.

  CAUTION: never do banking or other online financial work from a public computer.

  Many companies have "shared" PC's that are secure to use, but you may never have used it before. Portable apps and flash drives allow you to use them with greater productivity and convenience.

  You may also have a friend or coworker with a PC that you can safely use also.

Some of these products, such as the Kingston DataTraveler Elite, come with software to create secure containers on the drive where data can be secured with a password of your choosing.

Any device, however, can be secured with a great, free utility call TrueCrypt. I hope to write more on that topic soon.

How to use a USB Flash Drive

Simple. Plug it in to the USB port on your PC and wait a moment. You should see in the tasktray a notification that the device was found, it was recognized as a drive, and it's ready to use. Windows XP may even automatically pop open an explorer window showing the contents of the drive.

At that point, the device has a drive letter and you can copy data directly to it, or save data from an application.

Once in a while you can run into the problem of inserting a USB flash drive and having the system recognize it, but not assign a drive letter to it - making it all but inaccessible to you. The fix for that is here.

Don't just yank it out, follow these steps

1. Click on the removable device icon.
2. Select the device you want to remove.
3. Click to remove.
4. Wait for the "can now be safely removed" message.

Nowww... you can safely remove it.

Failure to follow this procedure could result in lost data. (If that happens, check out this info).

Important Note

Remember that the USB flash drive, just like any computer backup media, contains your data - so protect it as such. I do recommend password protection if you store anything of value at all on the drive.

If you use the device just to tote a driver you downloaded to an offline PC, then don't worry about it. But otherwise, always protect your data.

And just because you may have deleted the data from the drive, unless you securely erase the data, chances are that someone can recover that information if the drive falls into their hands.