23.08 Portable Storage Media – or, why you really ought to use the backed up spaces on Novell

There are three types of portable storage media commonly used here: diskettes (often called floppies), CD, and USB or flash drives. Diskettes are an old format: they hold little, fail easily, and the quality control, both on diskettes and the drives they use, has really gone south. Stop using these! CD’s come in two flavors “Read only” and “Read/Write”. Files written to a “Read only” CD end up on a medium with a nicely archival feeling, since they cannot be overwritten and edited. But “Read Only” is not much use if you want to modify a file later. “Read write” is more flexible. I tend to think use of CD’s as storage media has peaked, though, because of USB/flash drives. Also called “dongles” and “key drives,” these devices plug into a USB port on your computer (usually on the front of the CPU) and in most cases, proceed to map themselves to a drive letter. To use a USB/flash drive, plug it in, wait while some popups keep you informed, and, when it’s ready for use (it’ll tell you), open it as a folder not unlike the way you opened the two Novell folders above.

USB/flash drives rule because they have the capacity of hundreds or thousands of diskettes, they are built to be rugged, and they are extremely portable. They’re getting less expensive all the time too. They aren’t that hard to lose, though, so if your files are important, they are still much safer on a Novell drive – yours or a share drive.