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These are all one thing. These refer to a portable device the size of a your thumb that can hold the equivalent of thousands of floppies of information. They have effectively replaced the floppy. So much so that most new computers and all laptops come without the floppy drive.

This USB drives are the best way to transfer electronic files, including spreadsheets, music mp3’s, pictures, etc, from computer to computer. When you plug one in to a computer it shows up as a new drive in which then you can drag any file to it and even simply use the File Menu | Save As … option.

But there is more ability than simply storing and transferring files. They can also store full applications.

PortableApps.com is a great resource for portable applications. There are programs there which are Free that can replace many commercial programs. These are mainly Open-Source applications which you can use on any computer without having to install them.

Keep in mind that it is recommended that you have at least a 1 Gigabyte drive.

This allows you to put a photo editing program and an office suite on your USB drive and not worry whether your friends computer has the capable software to edit that picture or edit a document you’ve been working on.

There is a suite which installs the basic recommended software including a very functional startmenu which you can use on whatever computer you plug your drive in.

You do have choice if you want it though. You can choose just the platform with the start menu. Then install only software you want, which is what I recommend to save space.

Methodology

Choose platform only and install to USB drive.

From the that start menu click on options | Get more apps

Download the ones you want to install to your desktop. Then click install a new app and point it towards your desktop then your new app. It will then automatically install it to your USB drive.

This is a list of some apps to get your started:

Firefox - Internet Browser

OpenOffice - Office Suite to edit Word documents, etc

Pidgin - universal instant messenger

Gimp - Photo editing software

Security and Encryption

When you install Firefox first thing to do is to go to Tools|Options then the Security tab illustrated with a locked padlock. Set a master password so that whenever you ask it to remember a password it will always be protected by a master password.

The way it works is that if someone finds your USB drive they will be prompted for a password before remembering any of your passwords. For you, it will ask for the master password once on each session. Its convenient and its more secure. Remember the memory on the drive is persistent meaning it won’t erase over time unless you erase it.

Because of its persistent nature always make sure that you don’t have sensitive information stored in the drive unless it is encrypted. An easy way to do this is to use Winrar and set a password for compressed file. Set it to encrypt filenames, this way it will prompt the user for a password before even displaying a file name or directory name stored within the file.

Options in USB Drives

If you are looking to buy your first USB drive you might want to look into U3. This is a great option to keep your information safe. It hides your information and won’t let anyone access the information unless they have the right password.

I recommend it for its ease of use and for being the only technology which will protect the entire USB drive under a password. Only thing is, I recommend you disable all optional software and auto start programs that it comes with. It makes it slow and on slow computers it becomes extremely slow. Like portable apps it does have a start menu. So just uninstall everything and keep only what you do use to keep it lean and quick.

Update & Caution!

Recently I decided to plug in my U3 drive to my Ubuntu Linux laptop. It proceded to open the drive without a hickup, including without asking for a password. I was able to open all my files.

Meaning that the drive was not trully encrypted it seems that Linux can still load the drive bypassing the U3 security measures. This was very unacceptable and so I proceded to uninstall all the U3 software and made it a regular jump drive and used the techniques mentioned above, to encrypt my data. Which, by the way maintains security even when on Linux asking for passwords before I can access my encrypted data.

Hope this has been a good overview of what a USB drive can do.