How Do You Use Your USB Flash Drive(s)?

[J-Mac]

Just curious as to how different folks use their little tiny tremendously useful USB Flash drives - the little "keychain" drives, as opposed to full-size external drives.

I have about a half dozen of these little buggers, and I could not tell you exactly what is on which!  I used to use them for transporting files from one PC to another - especially when I was working.  However now I use my home network and other online storage dumps to move most of what I need to move.  Some of mine have photos on them, some simply have something I wanted to back up quickly before trying a certain software when I was concerned that it would mess up some data.

But I have so many redundant backup methods now that it is difficult to imagine all failing at once. But occasionally it is still convenient to just pop the flash drive onto a USB port and load it up with some stuff I'll need when I'm heading out to work on another computer somewhere.  Another example is that I have all of the Nirsoft and other similar software on one flash drive. These are the programs that NOD32 eats up and deletes whenever it finds them on my PC. Some programs aren't even remotely threatening, but NOD32's heuristic analysis doesn't like them and deletes them even when I have them listed as exclusions in the settings.  I just turn NOD32 off, download and transfer these all to a flash drive, and then remove it. Then I restart NOD32. This way they are always available to me. If I need to use any of these I first must turn the A-V off.  But otherwise I can't keep these on my computer at all.

Surely there are other cool ways people are using their flash drives.  Let's hear 'em!

Thanks!

Jim

[ChalkTrauma]

I use to run my entire work environment off my 8gb Survivor GT, and for a while it was great. I had it tuned to perfection, but then bad things  began to happen and I had to move my environment over to a iomega eGo external hard drive, that had it's own problems but I have been stable ( my drive that is ) for months now w/weekly backups.. Now I just use my usb flash drives to move stuff around between systems and I keep one loaded with troubleshooting apps, but I don't work off of one like I use too..

[suleika]

I have a couple of drives hanging around that I only use from time to time for passing data around the family or that kind of thing.  But I have two that I use more regularly, on to which I back up my portable apps, which I normally run from the data partition on my hard drive. 

I had a couple of laptops break on me within 6 weeks last year and although I had data backups and access to other laptops I found it really hard to stay organised.  I decided to stick to portable apps as much as possible from then on.  Earlier this year I bought a second laptop for travelling and it was very fast and simple to get it all set up with my most-used apps - simply copying the folders across, and also to keep the two laptops in sync. 

Anyway, I back up these folders (the portable apps) onto the usb drives "just in case", although I've not needed to use them yet, thank goodness. 

[f0dder]

I have a 2gig voyager that I occasionally use for data moving when I visit my brothers etc., it also contains my passwords.exe fSekrit container, and some various tools (subversion, the putty suite of SSH tools, notepad++ and such). Don't use it that often, but when I do it's a very nice little thing, and obviously it's ultra portable.

I also have an older 128meg drive, with a DOS boot sector - useful for running harddrive diagnostic tools, BIOS flash updates, and playing around with the occasional low-level code that won't work under windows.

[ljbirns]

I have  all my passwords  ( Portable Roboform )  on a 1 GB Sandisk Cruzer flashdrive alon with  Portable FF and Portable Thunderbird for when I'm not on my own computer. I also had Good Sync on it which I used to sync my e-mails between home and work.  A terrific tool.

Lew

[TucknDar]

I use it for transporting docs from home to work and school. Also for a few portable apps, such as Total Commander, EssentialPIM and Keepass for computer stuff elsewhere.

[Lashiec]

I only have one pendrive, a Kingston DataTraveler II, 1 GB of space, not much, but enough considering the amount of things I carry. I use it for dumping work from college, and from carrying things to my friends' computers, besides having Firefox in there, and probably I'll also add KeePass, to regain forum access from college (certain classes can get very boring).

[Renegade]

I keep a banking security certificate on 1. I also keep licenses for GDT (my software) on 1 whenever I'm leaving the country. Often I just end up using my iPod Nano for that though. However, I believe in redundancy (backups) and never trust them. I always have 2 for important things, and another backup in email or on a server just in case.

A friend of mine a few weeks ago was touting how he had years and years of work on his new shiny 4GB USB key tied to his mobile phone... Guess what broke?