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)."

what I'd do

[Tumbleweed]

> A copy of your browser cookies?

Cookies? Please. Try _bookmarks_. Definitely.
One's preferred text editor. Compression tools (zip, bzip2, etc.).
Perhaps some critical files for 'off-site' backups: your resume, a copy of your network settings, your address book, etc. The garbage file you snagged from that Gibson.

A network tool or tool(s), a virus scanner. Disk partitioning tools (PartitionMagic if you're a Windows user). A copy of your favourite games (BZFlag, GLTron).

Make this thing bootable, too, just in case, as some machines can boot off these things now. Yay!

Nothing! It's just a geek toy

[AdamBa]

I got my stylin' Thumbdrive Touch [thumbdrive.com] (with 21st-century-compliant biometric touchpad) just to look bitchin' on my keychain. I didn't store anything on it, what kind of propellor-head would actually do that?

Of course then the cover (the plastic part with the hole that you use to put it on a keyring, which probably costs about 40 cents wholesale) broke and now I can't even find the damn thing.

- adam

PLEASE remember...

[mcgroarty]

If you're walking around with ssh keys on your keychain, please remember to use strong password encryption on the key. The person who finds your keyfob may not be a stranger to your net habits.

If you've got a key you tend to use from only one place (i.e. work->home), consider prefixing the authorized_hosts line with a from="some.hostname.com" as well. This will prevent the key being used from a different IP by someone who "borrows" your keychain.

Re:PLEASE remember...

[zootread]

Look over to your upper-right. See that? That's a camera. Logging your every keystroke and also capturing everything that comes up on your screen.

Knoppix on a CD and /home on the usb drive

[evil_roy]

Portable system that will go anywhere.

Boot off the knoppix cd and mount the home dir on the usb drive.

This is the way to go, and you can have all the software you should need.

Re:PLEASE remember...

[zootread]

Good call. You can never every be completely secure. So don't grow any attachments to your possessions, the money you have in your bank account, the data on your hard drive, the cloths you are wearing, etc. In the blink of an eye you can lose them all. And there are no secrets, so don't do anything you wouldn't want anyone to know about.

</paranoid>