this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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An interesting point not touched upon is that the types of people using USB sticks has changed. Because the use of technology filters down from tech savvy, to general population, to people late to the scene or can’t change.
We are in that last stage now. They are buying by price and so easier to take advantage of.
There are machines that still use floppy disks as their only method to transfer on/off the machine. By machines I mean expensive hundreds of thousands of dollars research or production machines.
I haven't even found the need for a thumbdrive outside of flashing firmware and storage devices. All my documents are on google drive.
I use them for:
They definitely don't get as much use as before, but I'm still using them.
Edit: please don't downvote the person above me, they are only saying what is true for them :)
Also in a business context you need them to play displays on screens at conferences usually.
And students I imagine will frequently use them to print documents at the library, or design students at the print shop
In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.
The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.
In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.
Depends. on a 3x3 booth setup with just a screen on a pole with no connectivity - you don't want to run a cable to a laptop because you're using the table for product demos
Don’t mean this rudely, struggling to find a way that doesn’t sound condescending because I know things can be different in different regions. Didn’t realise that still happened.
I think it "just depends" - not trying to dox myself here but at cloud provider conference at Caesars forum, las vegas in summer of last year this was the setup we had.
Yeah I agree. I have a drive running Ventoy and that's about it.
Also if I'm moving a lot of data. I'll use a NVMe enclosure to speed up the transfer instead of network.
Be sure to have backups and not that sole location. Same is true of any physical drive, but at least a drive failure might be recoverable. A cloud storage can just be gone one day.
I think of "thumb drives" as portable SSD with USB. "Portable backup drives" have taken its place for me. Incredibly fast (NVMe SSD + USB-C), quite small (M2 card size + case), durable (same as thumb drives), growing sizes (1-2 TB affordable).
I keep my old flash drives for smaller things like bootable apps, fresh OS installs, firmware updates. I definitely have no need for mystery off-brand storage though.