I have covered how to use one of those flashdrive you have sitting around to create a personal (emergency) backup. Under some circumstances, this might actually be a life saver. There are some other ways to use flashdrives which may be if some more use…
Flashdrives are a good candidate for many uses in that they are quite small, and with storage space of a couple gigabytes, there are plenty of useful things you can do to make this into a worthwhile tool. Besides the personal backup setup there are some other things you could do.
Maybe the most obvious use is to create an emergency PC toolkit. By this I mean a flashdrive loaded with some tools to allow you to work on your computer in the case that the hard drive becomes corrupted, if the OS doesn’t load, if you accidentally deleted a lot of important files, and if the computer is terribly infected by a virus or some malware… The number of things which could happen to any computer seems to grow every year…
In the case of a PC toolkit drive (versus a Personal Backup drive) the good news is that you don’t need that much storage space, in that you only need a number of useful apps to use on the rest of the computer. With the Personal Backup drive you needed space to contain any of a growing list of important personal files…
This means that from checking through the links (see below) you might be able to come to the conclusion that a simple installation of Microsoft’s Sysinternals Suite would suffice. On the other hand, you could end up with a full blown Linux install running on the flashdrive, where you could have all of the tools you could think of to work on your PC’s hard drive and primary OS…it just comes down to how much screwing around you feel that you might needs to do to protect your system.
Tool kit – Take Back the Tech! Portable apps
http://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/online-safety
Top 40 tech tools every pc technician should have on their thumb drive
http://diggleby.com/tag/top-40-tech-tools-every-pc-technician-should-have-on-their-thumb-drive
A Computer Repair Utility Kit You Can Run from a Thumb Drive
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/a_computer_repair_utility_kit.php
Sysinternals Suite
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062
Handy programs to put on a USB stick
http://www.snapfiles.com/features/ed_usb_software.html
The Portable Freeware Collection
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?so=p
