What's On Your Thumbdrive?

Broue Master asks: "Nowadays, we need to support not only people at the office, but friends, family, friends of the family, family of the friends... you name it! They all run Windows to a degree and there are many tools to help you when assisting. Personally, I have a thumb-drive with removable memory cards. One of them has a small bootable Linux, the other one is filled with ready to use Windows utilities (CPU-Z, Ultra-Edit32), DOS utilities I've been collecting over the years, and Unix-style utilities (ps.exe, kill.exe, and others) ported to Windows, without the need for a layer like Cygwin. I also have a copy of the install files for AVG, Spybot, Sygate and the likes. But, even though I think I have many great tools, I'm sure I do not know about a lot of great others to help diagnose and solve problem. So I ask you, what's on your thumb-drive?"

Comments

Oh, you mean Knoppix? :-) (or BBC)

[billstewart]

Knoppix on a CDROM is a really convenient solution to a lot of Windows problems.
Boot it up, check the hardware, check the partitions, replace broken files,
and of course copy the important data off to a USB shoebox drive
(or to a CD/DVD if there's a second drive in the machine)
before doing any more serious maintenance. I've had to do that routine a few times.

The old "Linux Bootable Business Card" was a much smaller distro
that fit onto one of those 50MB truncated-small-CD formats,
and had a bunch of repair tools.

And of course thumbdrives can do the same thing,
but you need to be Really Really careful about viruses,
not only because we're reinventing the floppy disk virus vector,
but because one of the times you really need this sort of tool
is when a machine might be infected - CDROMs are really safe.

Re:The information needed to rebuild my life

[4D6963]

If there's one thing Katrina taught me, it's that losing your entire life would completely suck. Why not take a few minutes now so that you can get back to normal ASAP?

If all you need to rebuild your life can hold on a thumbdrive, I wonder what kind of life you live ;-)

Anyways, why carry it with you? Zip your stuff, encrypt it if you want, and put it on a couple of servers that are in two different cities. If you're gonna get in a Katrina-type situation, rather have your data in some server in Germany than in your pocket.

Insert subject here

[Klaidas]

So I ask you, what's on your thumb-drive?

Nothing. No, really. I use it to transfer files, not as the "Ultimate thing for fixing anything" :)