Planet Geek

USB Pen drives

Geekitude

Today I picked up a SanDisk 256meg Flash pen drive at Costco for a measely $51. I had been wrestling with the concepts of how to easily back up data at conventions without the hassle of a CDROm burner. I've been copying data back to my laptop, but that requires the laptop be online and ready to go.

Now, I know these things are passe now. Heck, you can even get flash drives built into watches, but it's always struck me as too expensive for not enough storage.

256meg seems like the most useable size, so since the price was so low, I picked it up.

Getting it working on the Linux laptop really was a matter of plugging it in and typing 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt', and voila, I had a 256meg drive available. I decided to basically just copy my critical information I need onto it, as my own personal backup.

SO, my documents and text files directory tree. My source code trees for my products. A backup of my mailbox directory (which has years of email stored in it). And my addressbook and calendar from Evolution.

All that combined copied to the drive (very very quickly), took up about half of it. Yes, I still have half the drive empty.

I could learn to like this techy geeky stuff.

Posted by dbs at July 14, 2004 6:15 PM