The other day a friend of mine was mentioning that they needed to go to the store and buy a flash drive, but when they were there earlier in the week they were overwhelmed by the vast differences in style and capacity flash drives come in nowadays. (Click here if you don't know what a flash drive is.) While style is completely personal, there are a few tips that can make picking a capacity (or more commonly called "size") of flash drive easier.
The first thing to consider is what you'll be putting on the drive. Are you using it to backup photos? Transferring songs between your computers? Or are you storing important documents and PDFs on it? Different files tend to be larger or smaller than others. For example, a good average size for a word document (1-3 pages of text) is about 20-30 KB (kilobytes). Audio (music, spoken word, etc) is about 1 MB (megabyte) per minute, and photos can vary wildly depending on resolution and file type but tend to be 1 MB or less per photo. (If you don't understand "megabyte" or "kilobyte" check back on Thursday when I'll be covering that topic.)
That being said, a 4 GB flash drive will hold roughly 4,000 photos, 4,000 minutes of audio, or more word documents than any one person would probably ever have for personal use at any one time. When stated like that, most people usually lean more towards getting a smaller (again, we're talking about capacity, not physical size) flash drive. Consider though if you're storing a home video. If you have a nice HD camera, it can take up to- or sometimes surpass- 2 GB (gigabytes) per hour of video. This is because videos contain both an audio track and thousands of pictures to make up the video.
Practical Tip of the Day:
If you're planning on using a flash drive to back up your files, I recommend reconsidering and getting an external hard drive instead. Far too often I've seen clients that have a drawer filled with flash drives that have photos on them, but because of this method, they have to search through the drawer looking for the correct drive if they need it and that's if they had the forethought to label the drives as they filled them. An external hard drive gives you one place to find all of them, making it much easier to locate your files if you need to recover them.
Showing posts with label files. Show all posts
Showing posts with label files. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
What Are Flash Drives?
Flash drives, thumb drives, jump drives. All these different names mean the same thing! It used to be, long long ago (all the way back in the 80's, and yes, I'm being sarcastic) that if you needed to share information with another personal computer you could put it on a floppy disk. Then you could put it on a different kind of floppy disk; These ones weren't really floppy anymore, but they were very similar. Fast forward a little bit and you get to compact disks- CDs for short. Then came DVDs, and then finally, the flash drive.
These are usually about an inch to an inch and a half (about the size of a thumb, hence being called "thumb drives" sometimes). You stick the smaller metal end into the USB port on your computer. If you don't know if your computer has this port or where it is, look at all the holes in the machine, usually on the back, but sometimes on the side or front as well, and look for something that looks similar. It is extremely likely that you have a USB port on your computer as they've been standard for quite some time now.
Once you plug it into your computer, you'll be able to find it using the same technique you use to find files on your computer, and you'll be able to manipulate it in the same ways as well. Flash drives are like mini-hard drives in that they allow you to store files on them, manipulate files on them, and remove files from them as well. They are very handy when you need to share files that are too large to send in other means like email or cloud storage. For example, my husband recorded a video that was too large to send in either of those methods so he put it on the flash drive, brought it to his brother, plugged it into his computer, and then copied it over. The entire process (minus driving time of course) took less than two minutes.
Practical Tip of the Day:
When you go shopping for a flash drive, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with options. There are cheap ones, expensive ones, fancy and plain ones, large ones, small ones, etc. The most important factor in picking out a flash drive is how much storage it offers. If you noticed in the picture I placed above, the flash drive there says it has four gigs. (A "gig" is a unit of measure for computer data.) It is important to think about how much space you'll need before heading to a store. Will you be storing large video files or just transferring small word processing documents? Once you've picked the size, that will help narrow down your choices. Everything else is secondary. They make ones that connect to your keychain, ones that look like movie characters, ones that are as small as your thumb nail, and the list goes on and on!
Once you plug it into your computer, you'll be able to find it using the same technique you use to find files on your computer, and you'll be able to manipulate it in the same ways as well. Flash drives are like mini-hard drives in that they allow you to store files on them, manipulate files on them, and remove files from them as well. They are very handy when you need to share files that are too large to send in other means like email or cloud storage. For example, my husband recorded a video that was too large to send in either of those methods so he put it on the flash drive, brought it to his brother, plugged it into his computer, and then copied it over. The entire process (minus driving time of course) took less than two minutes.
Practical Tip of the Day:
When you go shopping for a flash drive, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with options. There are cheap ones, expensive ones, fancy and plain ones, large ones, small ones, etc. The most important factor in picking out a flash drive is how much storage it offers. If you noticed in the picture I placed above, the flash drive there says it has four gigs. (A "gig" is a unit of measure for computer data.) It is important to think about how much space you'll need before heading to a store. Will you be storing large video files or just transferring small word processing documents? Once you've picked the size, that will help narrow down your choices. Everything else is secondary. They make ones that connect to your keychain, ones that look like movie characters, ones that are as small as your thumb nail, and the list goes on and on!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
If I Delete Something, Is It Gone Forever?
Most of us have heard that when you delete something from your computer it's "not really gone." Which inevitably leads to the question of "How do I make it really gone?" In order to really understand why deleting something doesn't obliterate it, you first need a quick primer on hard drives. If you haven't already read the article on How Do Computers Remember Things, click here to go over it- we'll be building on topics covered in there.
When a hard drive remembers something (aka "saves" it) it doesn't usually write it down in one spot on it's discs. It usually spreads it out and puts different parts in different spots, and creates a sort of mini table of contents so it can quickly find all the spots. It does this so if there's a small problem with one of the discs, it might affect a small part of a file and therefor keep it still usable, whereas if all the parts were together, the entire file would be broken.
When you delete something, it doesn't actually delete the different parts scattered about your drive. Instead, it deletes that table of contents file and thereby forgets it. Eventually the hard drive will put other files in that same space (remember, hard drives are magnetic so it can easily be rewritten), but until then, that part of the file is there as good as new. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to read part of a file that's been rewritten, much like if you wrote something on paper with a pencil, erased it, wrote something else over that spot, erased that, and so on. Each time it gets harder to read what was originally there.
There are ways to make things more permanently gone. For example, the Mac has an option called "Secure Empty Trash" that will first delete the parts of the file by re-writing over them seven times with random 1's and 0's (click here if you don't know why 1's and 0's) and then delete the table of contents file. There are similar things on Windows and other types of computers. If you use a method like this, it's highly unlikely that the file would ever be able to be found. (I never say never on these kinds of things!)
Practical Tip of the Day:
While it might be tempting to use one of those permanently delete options like Secure Empty Trash, you don't want to use it frivolously. Just like the paper beign written on and erased in the analogy, extra wear is put on the hard drive when you use these methods, and therefor slightly shortened the lifespan of your drive. My general rule of thumb for when to use this method is this: If this were a physical document, would you put it in the trash or shred it? If shred it, then use that method, otherwise, don't worry.
When a hard drive remembers something (aka "saves" it) it doesn't usually write it down in one spot on it's discs. It usually spreads it out and puts different parts in different spots, and creates a sort of mini table of contents so it can quickly find all the spots. It does this so if there's a small problem with one of the discs, it might affect a small part of a file and therefor keep it still usable, whereas if all the parts were together, the entire file would be broken.
When you delete something, it doesn't actually delete the different parts scattered about your drive. Instead, it deletes that table of contents file and thereby forgets it. Eventually the hard drive will put other files in that same space (remember, hard drives are magnetic so it can easily be rewritten), but until then, that part of the file is there as good as new. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to read part of a file that's been rewritten, much like if you wrote something on paper with a pencil, erased it, wrote something else over that spot, erased that, and so on. Each time it gets harder to read what was originally there.
There are ways to make things more permanently gone. For example, the Mac has an option called "Secure Empty Trash" that will first delete the parts of the file by re-writing over them seven times with random 1's and 0's (click here if you don't know why 1's and 0's) and then delete the table of contents file. There are similar things on Windows and other types of computers. If you use a method like this, it's highly unlikely that the file would ever be able to be found. (I never say never on these kinds of things!)
Practical Tip of the Day:
While it might be tempting to use one of those permanently delete options like Secure Empty Trash, you don't want to use it frivolously. Just like the paper beign written on and erased in the analogy, extra wear is put on the hard drive when you use these methods, and therefor slightly shortened the lifespan of your drive. My general rule of thumb for when to use this method is this: If this were a physical document, would you put it in the trash or shred it? If shred it, then use that method, otherwise, don't worry.
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