Cloud storage is gaining ground, but the USB stick has hardly lost its popularity. The plug-in memory is compact, cheap, works plug-and-play and gives the feeling that you have the data literally in your pocket. You probably also have one or more flash drives that contain important files. These tips and tools make those USB sticks even more interesting.
Twenty-five years ago, the first so-called ThumbDrive appeared on the market in Singapore, at a time when other storage media such as the floppy disk disappeared and the CD-ROM was already losing ground. After a quarter of a century, the flash drive is still firmly established and still evolving. The memory capacity varies from a few MBs to as much as 1 terabyte.
In terms of technological innovation, we cannot ignore the type-c USB, which achieves a speed of 10 GB/s. There is even attention for environmentally friendly housing made of bamboo, wood or recycled paper and the price of this storage medium has never been lower. For a 128 GB flash drive in which you can store more than thirty films, you pay less than ten euros. Did you know that you can also do the following things with it?
1 Lock
Use a USB stick as a key for your computer. Of predator lock and unlock your PC. You can start the tool with Windows. Then you insert the USB drive, you do your work and if you are not at your computer, remove the USB drive. Then the screen goes black and the system locks up. If you lose the USB drive, you can also unlock the PC by means of a password. The Home Edition costs ten dollars and you can use it for free for ten days.
2 Portable Apps Platform
Portable apps are programs that you don’t need to install. So you can easily copy them to a USB stick and then run them on any device you insert the drive into. This is a great solution if you want to keep certain apps handy to use on every PC nearby.
portable apps is a platform that allows you to download and access an interesting selection of portable programs through a menu. That way you create a portable software system.
3 Ultra-secure system
With some projects you want good privacy protection. tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. You install it for free on a USB stick of at least 8 GB and then restart the computer from the USB drive.
For example, Tails uses a Tor network for all internet activity, so the connection encrypted and anonymous is. And once you disconnect from Tails, everything you’ve done will disappear including the saved files. Unless you explicitly save the files permanently, but even then they will be encrypted. There is a version for Windows, macOS and Linux.
4 Install macOS
Apple users can easily get a rescue usb stick that restores the system without losing any data. First you download the desired version of the operating system from the first mentioned website below, but without executing it. Then install DiskMaker X and have an 8 GB USB stick ready for all operating systems before Catalina or 16 GB for Catalina itself (it doesn’t work this way at Big Sur). Then you follow the wizard of DiskMaker. The result is a bootable USB stick.
5 Addressing ReadyBoost
If you have an old, slow hard drive in your computer, ReadyBoost can speed things up a bit. Insert a USB stick into the machine, right-click on it in Explorer and open Properties. If the USB drive is fast enough (USB 2 or USB 3) and the hard drive is slow enough, you can ReadyBoost in the tab of the same name. This will cause Windows to read the cache from the flash drive instead of the disk.
6 Encrypt
Because it is so small, you quickly lose a USB stick. Encrypting the files on the drive prevents strangers from snooping on the data. Rohos Mini Drive is easy to use and free. When the program is started, it will find the connected pendrive itself and show a window to enter a password. At the same time, the tool creates a shortcut on the desktop that makes it easier to access the protected USB stick. You will find a new disk drive in Explorer: Encrypted disk (R:).
7 Backup
Some USB drives can be so important to you, it’s smart to get one to back up. That is easy with Win32 Disk Imager. Usually this tool is used to write bootable disk images to flash drives, but you can also create images with it. Install the program, open it and insert a USB stick.
Select a location where the image will be saved, give the image a name and click the button Read. If you want to restore the disk image later, open the same tool. You select the disk image and you click To write.
8 Formatting Secure Flash Drives
Can’t write data to the USB flash storage and the drive won’t even format? First check if the stick has a switch to disable the disk protection. If not, the free program will help SD Formatter. Although it is intended for SD cards, it also works perfectly with USB flash drives. Such a flash drive is really just an SD card with a USB interface.
9 Change drive letter
Anyone who cannot access his data, while the USB drive is visible in Windows Explorer, often concludes that the data will be damaged. But sometimes it may just be that Windows cannot assign a drive letter to the stick. Open Disk Management by right-clicking the Start button to click. Locate the USB stick in the drive list, right click on it and choose Change drive letter and paths. Change the letter and see if you can now access the files.
10 Reinstall Driver
If it still does not work, it is also possible that the USB driver on Windows is damaged. Leave the USB stick in the machine and open Device Manager by right on Start to click. click on Disk drives to expand the menu to see all the drives that are connected. Right click on the disk drive you are trying to repair and select Remove device.
Then remove the flash drive from the machine and reboot the operating system. Then you put the USB stick in the computer again. Windows will automatically detect these and install the new drivers.
11 Quick delete
Windows 10 and all previous versions used a write cache setting when copying data to a USB stick. If you took that stick out of the PC without safely removing it first, it was possible that you interrupted the write operation. Microsoft now chooses as the default setting Quick deletewhere the cache is not accessed.
When the system has visibly finished copying, you can easily remove a stick from the machine without safely removing it. You can find that setting at Disk Management. Right click on the removable data carrier at the bottom and choose Properties. Select in the tab Policies the option Quick delete.
12 Bootable
There are situations where it makes sense to boot from the USB stick instead of the internal hard drive. That way you can run a recovery program or anti-virus tool. You can make a pendrive bootable with YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer).
Insert the drive into the PC and run the program. You use this open source tool to run Windows installers, clone drives, and place diagnostic tools on bootable USB drives.
13 Measuring speed
The speed of a flash drive is sometimes disappointing. Even USB3 sticks are considerably slower than the theoretical maximum read speed of 450 MB/s. And the write speed is often even worse, many do not even reach 100 MB/s. SpeedOut is a small, portable tool that measures the read and write speed of the flash drive. The tool performs four passes and then returns the average. SpeedOut is free and non-destructive; that means no files are overwritten and the drive does not need to be formatted.
14 Deep Erase
Even deleted files are not safe for someone who finds your USB stick. For example, to thoroughly erase sensitive files, you can use Eraser. First you make a New task on by clicking the arrow next to Erase Schedule to click. You give this task a name, for example erase usb. late at Task Type the option on Manual to stand. Then select with the button Add Dates what needs to be deleted.
Via the option Drive/Partition choose you in this case USB DISK. Finally, you choose an erasure method. The Gutmann method for example, performs 35 different passes to overwrite the data, but in most cases the Schneier 7 pass method.
15 Read only
Make removable USB drives more secure by write-protecting them. That way, others can’t put data from their own machine on the flash drive and you prevent viruses from their machines from being spread through your USB drive.
USB Disk Manager is free and turning on write protection is a matter of ticking a box. You can also use the tool to disable the Autorun feature so that no program can start by itself when you plug in the drive.
