I am typing at a computer in the computer office of my University Library and, I must say, it's a heck of a lot better than typing at my laptop. I don't know why it is, but it is. XD I had an idea. I could type my journals and stories on here and save them on the thumb drive. While I'll always back them up on my laptop at the end of the day when I get home, I figured that while I'm at school, I'll take full advantage of this and keep typing/saving on my thumb drive. But...wouldn't it mess up the thumb drive, treating it as my own personal document holder where I work on various writing stuff? I guess as long as I make sure to keep it backed up on my computer, it doesn't matter that much, right? Still, I'm anxious to try it out because I love to type here.
I thought that's what thumb drives were for. Your average thumbdrive is tested for about 10,000 read-write cycles. (Or at least some obscenely high number.) Just keep a backup and there aren't any worries. Heck, you could get a new one for the price of dinner at a fancy restaurant.
Read-write cycles? You mean like the number of times I open the thing to type in a document? But yes, I should keep a backup on my laptop just in case. =)
That's what thumbdrives were created for, so long as you make a backup--I had one unfortunate incident with a thumbdrive and a story that involved the loss of about 60 pages of writing because I was on a 3 week trip and never backed it up onto a computer. If you have internet access on all of the computers you use then you might just want to use GoogleDocs instead, though, because it will be available on all of the computers and you won't have to worry about backups
Check out Dropbox instead. Way better than a thumb drive, especially since it automatically keeps the last 30 versions or so of your documents. You can access your Dropbox folders anywhere with an Internet connection. There are also apps for iPhone, Android, etc. so you can access your files on your smart phone.
As everyone said, this is what thumb drives are for. Be glad you don't have to deal with floppy disks like they did decades ago. Even though they were flat, they were long and wide and cumbersome. Zip disks weren't much of an improvement except that they could hold a lot more data. Thumb drives can hold even more and can practically fit on your keychain.
Decades ago? When I wrote my first novel between 2002 and 2005, I used a Canon Starwriter word processor with a floppy disk drive, which was how I stored my work. I did actually buy my first laptop computer in 2003, but because I'd started writing the book on the word processor, I just kept going that way. Ultimately however, I did have to retype the whole story (132,000 words) into Word, which was a pain. Never again.
mine WAS ruined by using it at a public computer because it got some kind of virus from it, so I couldn' use it amymore. It even almost infected my computer too, when I tried to conect it to it... If this computer is a public one I would give it a second thought.
This is a very serious consideration. I've seen several completely bug-infested public computers. There may be no problem, it all depends on who is servicing the computer and their skill level. But be careful, and make sure your real PCs all have good anti-virus software, and scan the thumb drive before using it again at home.
Ugh, Zip disks. I still wake up at night thinking about the "Click of Death" that took an entire manuscript AND my thesis. I did learn a lesson about backing up, though. To the OP: I save most of my writing on a thumb drive in the way you describe, moving it from home computer to work computer (and other computers). As has been said by others, just make sure you back it up here and there and you should be fine.
No, the figure refers to the number of times each individual memory cell can be (re)written to. Modern thumb drives use wear levelling - your document is saved to different memory cells each time, so none of them is worn out early. In practice you can save your document far more than 10 000 times. The risk of losing the thumb drive, or accidentally deleting the files yourself, is probably far higher than the risk of technical failure. As long as you keep copies of your files in several places, you should be fine.
Try having a whole Jaz drive wiped because I "stuck it in wrong." Fortunatly all of my stuff was in the recycle bin of the computer with the burner. I guess the moral is that you can't rely on anything.
If the computers are conected to the net, just email your work to yourself. Just type your email address in the 'send to' box, attach and send. Just another form of back up.
