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Portable USB Drive (USB Key, USB Pen Drive)

Click here to go back to the intro page on backing up your files

A USB drive is a compact, portable storage device that is similar in use to your hard drive except that it is small enough to carry around in your pocket or attached to your key chain. Some of these drives can hold more than 4GB of data, you can choose among various sizes from 256MB and up. Most USB drives are not platform dependent and can be used interchangeably on Windows and Apple computers as long as you open the individual files in the right application/platform. Some manufactures claim that these drives can store data for up to ten years, but this has not been proven yet since they have not been widely used for that length of time. They are sometimes referred to as Flash Drives, Jump Drives, Pocket drives, Pen drives, etc, but they work the same way the differences being price, capacity, design and built in additional features which may come as extras with your drive.

When you plug your USB drive into the USB port on your computer and it will show up under my computer as a new drive. In the picture of my "My Computer" window, the USB key shows up as "Removable Disk E:" the drive letter on your computer will depend on the letters already assigned to the existing drives.

Double click on the icon identifying your USB drive. It's folder window opens in a manner quite similar to any of your other drives. To save files and folders to the USB key, simply drag and drop the files or folders to this window.

You can open this drive again on the same computer or a different computer by plugging it into the USB port and clicking it's icon under my computer. You can then open files to edit and when you click Save, they will be saved back to the USB drive, just as they would be saved to your regular drives.

Alternatively you can choose to save directly to the removable USB drive from within the application while you are working on a file in it's native application. For instance you can save your word document to the removable drive within Microsoft Word, using File --> Save As  commands and then selecting "Removable Disk" from the "Save As" dialog box.

Safely remove your USB Drive
Don't just hang up when you're done, let your operating system finish doing it's thing with your removable drive. Instead of simply pulling out the drive, right click on it's icon on the bottom right of your tray - in the picture below the icon has a big yellow arrow pointing to it. When you right click, the box with "Safely Remove Hardware" appears.

Click on "Safely Remove Hardware". The Window below will open, click on Stop.

In the Stop a Hardware device window click on the name/brand of your removable drive, and click OK. In this case my removable drive is LEXAR JUMPDRIVE SPORT USB DEVICE.

You will get a message just above the icon for the removable drive saying that your storage device can now be safely removed from the system. At this point you can pull out your removable USB drive.