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)."

Storage or transportation?

[NanoGator]

Well, if I had one, it'd be more for "I need to get data from here to there" than for "I need to store data in my pocket." Right now I have little 2.5" CD-RWs I use for getting drivers etc around the office. This'd be faster I think.

Re:MOD PARENT TROLL

[Sklivvz]

You can actually BOOT linux from windows... LOADLIN.EXE does that... I'm not a troll, get your facts straight, sweetie! ;-)

school work

[Blob Pet]

My entire UNIX account from school, including all my read mail and web pages, is backed up on my USB drive. I store anything I think I might need to work on just in case I don't have internet access.

unxutils!

[\\]

i used to have a cygwin install on my keychain, but it requires some registry crap in windows to work properly.

rather than clutter up the registry of every windows computer i'll ever use (joke here), i use unxutils [sourceforge.net], which has a great command line interface. along with cli gpg and my ssh keys, my usb keychain is of great use to me when i'm away from my powerbook.

quicken backup, etc...

[Dukebytes]

I backup quicken on it because it is a LOT quicker than floppy. And of course its great for transfer of personal files, email, avi, mp3 etc... between work/home/friends.

I love it - I bought a 128MB and it is just about perfect. I carry it around like a pocket knife :)

I got my dad to buy one to backup his files while hes on the road. And I just had to have one after setting his up for him and such. If you DONT have one - go get one, really...

Duke

Re:The obvious answer...

[rossz]

Won't fit in 32Meg, but I found one that runs around 100Meg called runt [ncsu.edu]. I put it on my Laks watch [thinkgeek.com] and was able to boot from it on a computer that supported USB booting. With a boot floppy, I was able to boot other systems that did not support USB booting.

Re:The obvious answer...

[soleblaze]

afaik, usb thumbdrives (or whatever they're called) act as usb drives, and in most modern bios you can select 'boot from usb drive'

Puppy linux for starters

[monopole]

Puppy linux fits in 48MB w/ a X windows interface and office software
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
Mesh-AP fits in 32MB and incorporates an ad-hoc WiFi mesh and an Opera browser
http://www.locustworld.com/
Trinux fits in a floppy with heavy duty security functions
http://www.trinux.org/

What's in Your Wallet, er Drive

[lww]

So, here's what my pendrive looks like after 10 months of use:

/docs - all my personal docs (bookmarks, resume, will, keyfiles, etc)

/proj - source checkouts for personal projects under active development. Dedicated Eclipse workbench and tailored shortcut for launching eclipse. This lets me have one ide for java, python, documentation, websites, xml/xsl, etc.

/xfer - file transfer/holding area for moving stuff between locations/systems

/linux - aliases, scripts, must have utils

/win32 - gvim, dedicated profiles for thunderbird and firebird. Installs (but not installed) for putty, winzip, firebird (instant browser!)

Note, Putty is registry dependent, and the workaround for using it on a pen drive is too painful for everyday use. I love Putty, but it doesn't live on my pen drive. I wish it would :(

Having firebird and thunderbird profiles on the pen drive means that I can have firebird/tbird installs live on work/home/laptop machines but always keep my data off the boxes and in my hands. I keep my bookmarks in my /docs directory in case I'm on a foreign box.

I keep...

[Tom7]

My Windows XP EFS keys (hey, if any of you are using encyrpting file system on Windows, make sure that you export the keys and store them somewhere. Because if you can't get windows to boot for some reason, even if you know your password and have access to the hard drive, there's no supported way to decrypt the files without having previously exported the keys.)
and PGP key.
Small files I'd be really upset to lose, like midi or tablature for a bunch of songs I wrote.

And a whole bunch of MP3s, since my drive is also an MP3 player!

The thing is, anywhere you'd care to use putty, it's probably easier to just download it from the internet, since it's just one file. (Maybe it would be sensible to store some "offline" apps on it, but I don't have any I care for..)

Cleaning your USB drive

[jtheory]

I think it may have been the OS that was gumming things up in my case, but I used my 64MB pen drive to transfer stuff from an old computer (win98) to a newer one (win2k), and the free space kept shrinking even though I deleted the files.

So obviously this is an MS-only tip -- but you can alter your folder options to show hidden/ os-protected files, and all the junk will show up. Just delete it, and you have your space back (no negative side-effects that I noticed).

Alas, that drive was somehow left on a driveway at my parents' house when I was visiting, now that I have it back (via the postal service) it's no longer recognized as a valid USB device. I'm guessing no one will have any tips on how to fix mine?

Re:Storage or transportation?

[innosent]

Exactly, I use mine for backups and portability for my important work, school, and car (I'm doing a Mini-ITX system to replace the instrumentation, shifter, and audio/video in my car) stuff, and use the remaining space when I need to transfer something between systems, sort of like a really big (256MB) floppy.

Re:How can you easily mount/unmount under GNU/Linu

[cymen]

See:

- automount
- hotplug architecture
- kde3 has nice option to put new mounted filesystems on desktop as icons, see prefs.

Trillian

[OneBarG]

Trillian [trillian.cc] can run from portable media (even a CD if you're not interested in changing settings). Gotta modify some ini's to make the paths relative, but it works pretty well.

Somebody even set up a website with step-by-step instructions

Trillian Anywhere [trilliananywhere.com]

Re:How resilient?

[Santos L. Halper]

I'm on my 2nd pen drive now. I sold my first one, a 128 MB Lexar in order to get a 256 MB one. I put mine on my keychain. Since then I've dropped my keys on the road several times, taken naps with them in my pocket, and who knows whatever else with them. So far I have not had so much as a hiccup out of either one of them.