What's A ThumbDrive Daddy?

All things Thumb, and why you can't live without one...

floppy drive, hard drive, Zip drive, Tape drive, CDR/RW, DVD-R/RW all these things store our data you may have used all of them or some. However some just don't belong in your pocket...

Today's best answer is a Thumb Drive or as we will refer to it futher on as a "TD", just a few ounces and its tiny like a keychain fob or smaller and capable of holding one gigabyte or even more. If you own a Windows XP/ME/2000 system you simply put your TD into any unused USB port and in a couple seconds it acts just like the internal hard drive in your computer! I own a 256 Meg TD and its replaced a bunch of CDRs I always carried everywhere and I have forced myself to only the data that I need to repair computers some bookmarks and my resume.
I cannot begin to tell you how easy it is now to just reach into my pants pocket where the TD lives everyday.

Any data that's important needs to be backed up, Personally there are very few items I need to backup on a TD, I still copy my basic setup of my entire computer to a quick restore DVD-r "perhaps there's another post there?" but it sure would be nice to carry a few programs a resume and perhaps some of my favorite bookmarks everywhere all the time and not let the world think Im a geek.
The real point here is at what point can I carry data so its at hand anytime and not a burden to have wherever I go and be big enough to keep things that can help me or make me money each day.

At home, Instant backup of home business or school projects.

At work, take home projects and move data outside the network to other offices with total security. "Just don't loose it"

At School, well just about everything except icy cold beverages*! Scan the books you own the papers your writing ect. "*for you college students"

Some drives now offer encryption and even built-in biometric scanners (Read, James bond stuff) There are many programs to back-up the moment you plug your drive in too.
See JumpVault Backup or PicoBackup for just outlook or PC-Mac PasswordVault for logins and identity. Don't forget you can put one around your neck on a keychain or a few are small enough to slip in a wallet

Lets move on, Ok I just got a TD what will I do now???
Well here are a few ideas on how you can use it beyond a few documents and a resume.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/Mozilla/ (portable Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.)

http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_openoffice/ (portableOpen Office)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/abiwordftd (word processor)

http://www.trilliananywhere.com/ (IM)http://www.miranda-im.org/ (IM)

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ (Linux OS)

Keep looking, there many more apps you can run off a thumb!

Next time I go on a trip, I'm totally bringing the portable Thunderbird and Firefox with me.
So have you got one yet?
I'm gonna go get a one Gig thumb right now... hehe.

Thanks to Mike SP for the Research on links above.