Tips: Getting the most out of your pen drive.

Recently, my 256MB pen drive had gotten buried under the mass that is my office, and I remained oblivious to its disappearance. Once I did finally find a need for it, and then once I finally actually found it, upon plugging it in I discovered that all the file structure was amazingly cluttered from the last time I used it, I had to hunt through directories, many times twice, to find what I wanted, applications were cluttered with old information, the whole thing was a mess. So after cleaning the whole thing up and streamlining its operation (yes I made notes on how I wanted to do this) I now share some of the tools/methods I used.

• directory structure
  

  Unix is the best example of good directory structure, very short, meaningful directories that break things down into categories. Example, on my pen drive I have a Programs, Tools, Texts, and Docs directory. These directories cover most everything I tend to want to have on my portable drive.

  
  

  Under the programs directory I have various "portable software". I.E: portable firefox, portable filezilla, and similar programs.
  

  
  

  
  Within tools I have various portable executables such as netcat and nmap, as well as a hacked version of putty called portaPutTy.

  
  

  Under Texts, I have various documents in plain text format, unlike the Docs directory which contains only documents which I chose to store in a separate format such as encrypted LockNote files or html files.

  
  
  



• TrueCrypt Volumes
  

  In my opinion programs like TrueCrypt and portable flash drives are a match made in digital heaven. With such volume and portability, the amount of sensitive information that can be carried, and lost, on a flash drive make protecting said information a very high priority. TrueCrypt allows you to create virtual partitions on portable media, or even encrypt the physical drive with today's fastest and most secure algorithms in existence.

  
  


• Program Launcher
  

  Such programs may sound very trivial, but when directories start getting deeper and deeper, finding needed programs and running them quickly can make a flash drive really perform. That's why I like to use Pstart to launch Portable Firefox and the like, I even have batch scripts which perform certain command line operations with a simple click. Pstar will also minimize to the system tray with an Icon and will give you a menu to launch programs from without opening another window on your desktop.