I’m a great lover of USB memory sticks. You may know them as
flash drives or thumb drives.

Whatever you call them, they are incredibly useful things.

And they are getting cheaper and cheaper for more and more memory
capacity.

I bought a couple of 4Gb ones today for about $9 each. And if I’d
shopped around, I’m sure I could have found cheaper.

To me, they are useful because I can have one dedicated to saving
all the files I need for one specific thing. So, if I’m creating
a new product, I can save everything onto that one memory stick
and then know where everything is. I don’t have to go hunting all
over my hard drive for files in all kinds of random places.

I know I could probably do the same with folders on my hard
drive, but it is so much more convenient to be able to unplug all
my data from one computer and plug it in to another.

But now that my little collection of memory sticks is growing, I
have hit on an unexpected problem – remembering what is on each
one.

There is no simple way to label the darned things!

The are all different shapes and sizes, and are made out of
different materials. Some will take a small stick on label, but
others, like the ones I bought yesterday, are made out of a kind
of roughened plastic that my sticky labels won’t stick to.

Has anyone solved the problem – or is it just me who is getting
the wrong end of the wrong stick?

Update: Since I wrote the above, it has been drawn to my attention that there are some fake 64Gb memory sticks being sold on unscrupulous websites. I don’t need that kind of memory myself, but if you do, be careful who you buy them from if you buy online.

Security: Another thing that has been raised is the potential security problem if you happen to mislay your memory stick.

We all know about stupid politicians and civil servants who lose their laptops on trains and from their cars, but at least most of those laptops are passwod protected to some degree. Most USB memory sticks are far less secure. It is only a matter of time before a senior government person lets his flash drive, with all the country’s nuclear secrets accidentally fall out of his pocket!

If you are concerned that your data might fall into the wrong hands if you lose your flash drive, there is a pretty good solution – and it is free!

You can download a program called TrueCrypt from http://www.truecrypt.com to make the data of any USB memory stick encrypted behind a password of your choosing. It has to be a new stick though, because the process will format the drive and destroy any data already on it.

Just make sure you pick a password that you can remember – and that other people will not be able to guess!

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