I have never been much of a fan of flash drives. Sure, once they became cheap enough to buy (back around 2004), I loved their obvious improvement over CD/CD-RW, but I always found them too easy to lose and too hard to manage. Not to mention losing the caps.

Now that USB thumb drives have gotten to the point where 4GB ones are essentially being given away at conference and the like, I have several of these, but they stay unused. Why? THE CLOUD. First off, since I have my own home server running at home, I can access all my files from anywhere, as well as share files with others using temp, unique links. If I am uncomfortable with sharing my home ip, I can just use dropbox/box/[put file sharing service here] to share/transfer files. Nowadays, with good enough upload bandwidth, this applies also to large files. Not to mention, cloud allow parallel downloads, versus the physical, queued nature of passing flash drives around.

Another rant. Flash drives are too hard to manage. I’m sure all of you have several each. How do you keep track of what files are on what and where the damn thing is right now? It’s very dangerous to store the only copy of a file on a flash drive. I would suggest using it only to transfer at best.

Hmmm..would be interesting if SanDisk and co start a flash drive in the cloud idea 🙂 The difference compared to file hosts being, use it to transfer files with minimal hassle. No permanent storage.

PS: My mom sometimes still uses her flash drive, but I’m trying to get her out of it 🙂