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Useful Applications
For A USB Drive
We all love our USB drives, don’t we? You should
probably be using some portable apps on your USB drive – if not,
check out
100-portable applications for your USB drive here.
In this post, I want to cover a few apps that
will make managing your USB drive easier. In
essence, I’ll talk
about tools that can be used to make things easier if you’ve got a
USB drive – not about apps that work from your drive.
So here we go - five applications to make things
easier if you’re using a USB thumb drive.
1) Prevent Virus Infections on your USB Thumb
Drive with
ThumbScrew
If you’re working on a system that’s probably infected with
viruses, you wouldn’t want to see your USB thumb
drive get infected by the same – they probably have
some backups of your data that you cannot afford to lose.
However, if you’re in an inevitable situation where
you really have to access the USB drive,
do so after you install
ThumbScrew.
ThumbScrew can be used to write-protect your
USB drive so that malware from your
computer doesn’t spread to it.
Download and launch the app, right click the
System Tray icon and choose ‘Make USB Read Only’.
Nothing could be written to the USB Drive,
you’re completely protected from infections spreading to your disk
from your computer.
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2) Eject USB Devices Quickly with
USB Disk Eject
Windows does give you options to eject your USB drives
– we all use that by clicking on the ‘Safely Remove
Hardware’ option in the System Tray. But
have you ever thought it’s too cumbersome and the list confuses you
more than helps you remove that particular device?
People who’ve got multiple USB Devices connected
to their system will have really felt this annoyance as the hardware
remove dialog doesn’t make it clear which option removes what
device.
Here’s the solution:
Download this tiny but
functional app called
USB Disk Eject. Just double-click when you need
to remove a USB drive and a window will pop up listing
the devices connected to your system via USB.
Each device is labelled clearly and legibly. Just
double-click on the one that you want to get removed and
you’re done.
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3) Access USB Drives Quickly with
Desk Drive
DeskDrive is somewhat similar to the above
application, but it’s for keyboard junkies.
Here’s a summary of the app:
DeskDrive puts shortcuts to your USB
drives on your desktop immediately after you insert
them. Quick access.
That’s pretty much it. Download the app directly from
here.
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4) Autorun Apps from your USB Drive with
USB Autorun Maker
How many times have you browsed through those myriad of folders
to launch that one particular app that you always run from
your USB drive? Why not make it autorun so
that the application launches immediately when you open the drive
icon?
Yep, that’s possible, thanks to a utility called USB Autorun.
Download
USB Autorun (direct link), and use the options
in the system tray icon to build an autorun.inf
file. You’ll have to specify which app should be run
automatically,
and click ‘Build’ and the autorun maker
will create an autorun.inf file that tells Windows
that a particular app should be launched. No big thing to do here –
you just need to specify the path where the app is present. Please
note that this software is shareware, so there are
some limitations.
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5) Backup Files to your USB Drive with
SyncToy
How many times have you copy-pasted those
folders in Windows to back up your most important data and got fed
up copy-pasting back and forth? Just relax, and get
the
SyncToy tool from Microsoft.
Install the
Synctoy application, specify what directory should be
copied to where – it’s called a ‘folder pair’ in
Synctoy (here in this case, the directory where your files should be
put in should be somewhere in your USB Drive) and then just press
the Run button for the backup operation
to take place.
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Share & Enjoy !!!
If you have any specific questions, please do
not hesitate to
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