What's on Your USB Pen Drive?

gmhowell asks: "With the popularity of USB pen drives, I've thought it time to join the crowd and get one. But I'm curious as to what is so important that you should always have a copy. Clearly PuTTY or your favorite SSH client is important. Perhaps with some keys. But what else? A copy of your browser cookies? MP3s? Pictures? What other software is smart enough to run from a portable medium without need for an installation? (Yup, MAME and z26 seem like likely candidates)."

Comments

Cradle of Filth

[Mod Me God]

Are on mine: Damnation and a Day Album.

And a few PGP keys.

Nice.

Password Safe

[acousticiris]

I used to use Password Safe at work so that I could have randomized passwords and a system to retrieve them from, but it was very inconvenient because I wouldn't have the changes I made at home.
I now store my password safe database on my pen drive and just plug it into a USB slot when I need it--since I'm one of those geeks with a keychain equivalent to George's Wallet (Seinfeld)--it's always with me wherever I am.
I also store various utilities that I use from day-to-day, and made it bootable so that I can boot from it on ailing workstations when I need to.

If I had one...

[C.Maggard]

I'm a college student, so I'd probably keep a few small games on there to bide the time in computer labs, copies of papers and programs I had to write in case I forgot the hardcopy and needed to print it out again, and probably some PGP keys and a favorites list.

Discount on Dell USB drive

[Anonymous Coward]

For limited time Dell Home Systems has Dell 128 MB USB drive for $31.95. Click the link for additional 10% off and no sales tax (sorry, TX people).

Re:Storage or transportation?

[tackaberry]

We've had a number of occassions where we've had to transfer a PowerPoint presentation from someone's laptop (because they decided to change all of their slides after e-mailing or burning a copy of their final version) to the one that is actually being used and hooked up to the projector

CVS

[jgrahn]

The stuff I work on (texts, source code, ...) checked out from my CVS repository. CVS lets me sync changes between the files on my USB memory and the various computers I use. Pretty nice side-effect of a version control tool.

I also reserve about 30MB for a FAT partition; file transfers between work and my connectionless old HP Vectra.

Everything that you might want immediately.

[eclectric]

Here's what I store on mine.

1. Important documents. Mostly my poetry and fiction writing.
2. Funny little pictures I find on the net. I might want to show them to someone.
3. My irc software (mirc, in this case)
4. My Firebird and Thunderbird profiles. Finally, roaming profiles!
5. Copies of Firebird and Thunderbird. (so if I'm on a dialup computer, it doesn't take me very long to get up and running.
6. Backups of important files from both home and work. Just in case I lose the original, or need that file.

Very useful things, for the roaming profile alone.

i use it for every damn thing.

[Unknown Poltroon]

Personal: papers and documents going back to 1988, books im reading, picutres of friends, family, neekid strangers, my internet links, resumes,documents, interesitng web pages, i use it as my main storagefor personal stuff, and back it up often.
Work: Its fantastic for transferring/working with hughe documents and mailing lists the you dont want to put up on the network, also its fantastic for transferring peoples slightly outsized power point presentations and whatnot from their laptops, to the computer of the person theyre workig with, especially when its a personal laptop with no way of connecting to the netowrk.

Essentially, i use it for anything that wont fit on a floppy, or anything i want to have with me on a moments notice. I think theyre the greatist thing since sliced bread.

Useful Nuggets

[3r33tguy]

I won a 64mb USB thumbdrive while at the last AZSAGE meeting. I didn't know what I would do with it at first, but it quickly became the most essential part of my keychain. The first thing I put on it was TightVNC and Putty. That alone seemed like it would make the thing pretty handy. Then I went to tinyapps.org and grabbed a ton of useful stuff including...

1) compression tools
2) encryption tools
3) a few graphic tools
4) secure file deletion tools
5) tiny web server
6) tiny ftp server
7) tiny irc server
8) tiny irc client
9) tiny personal firewall
10) hex editor
11) unix commands for DOS
12) misc other stuff

After all that I still had 44mb to work with. I threw all the scripts I'd written, a few priceless pics, a couple mp3s, and I still have 30mb to go.