

Ask YC: What do you keep on your USB flash drive? - smanek

I finally broke down and got a 4GB USB Flash Drive. Since I'm a little late to the game, I was wondering how all of you have yours set up?<p>My own machines all run Linux or OS X, but I occasionally use other peoples Windows machines, so I have several versions of a lot of these binaries.<p>I only keep a few useful utilities unencrypted on the drive (PuTTY, TrueCrypt, Firefox, Filezilla, packet sniffer, etc). I then have all my personal files (documents, firefox profile, ssh/gpg keys, etc) in an encrypted Truecrypt file. I also have a simple script set up to sync my personal files with my SVN repo when I plug the USB drive into my laptop.<p>Anything major I'm missing, or that you've found useful?
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Herring
I used to have one like yours. All set up with many environments zipped up &
ready to extract. I vaguely remember writing batch scripts (yukk) to automate
7-zip's encryption for a locked up computer that didn't allow truecrypt.

In the end it just wasn't worth it. However long I worked on it, it just
didn't compare to having my own laptop. These days I just use my USB drive for
transferring documents.

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smanek
Fair point. What do you think of keeping some sort of virtual machine
image/player on the flash stick (qemu?).

That way, you effectively get your own computer where ever you go ...

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kamme
I'm in the same boat as you, I run Linux, my girlfriend OSX and
friends/parents have windows boxes. I started with portable firefox for both
OSX and windows. Same for putty, ftp client, etc... But in the end I realised
all I had on there was for online use. So instead of using all those programs,
I just put portable firefox on it and added some extentions, like fireftp for
ftp and sites like google notebook, meebo. Now all the other things that are
on there are a couple of files (mp3, txt snippets), firefox portable and qemu
with a basic linux install.

