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What's on Your USB Pen Drive?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-it-with-you dept.

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)."

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Password Safe by acousticiris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "God is dead!" - Nietzsche
    "Nietzsche is dead!" - God
  2. Re:Storage or transportation? by tackaberry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  3. CVS by jgrahn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Everything that you might want immediately. by eclectric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.