Pete's PC and Web Tips - Memory Sticks Do's and Don'ts

I have seen too many people lose data in the following manner and strongly advise you all NOT to use your memory sticks as a data back-up but rather only use it as a temporary holding place. From time to time copy all the contents of your memory stick to a folder on your hard disk and call it something like memstick 6Nov2009 Once you are sure you have copied everything then use MyComputer and format your memory stick to “refresh” it and then copy back any important stuff you want on it from your hard disk. A rather useful program I use for checking if all files were copied or for finding duplicates is called Clonespy which is a very small program and runs direct from an .exe file and so requires no installation. I will demonstrate it’s use shortly. Something else along the same lines can lead to many problems and I see people doing this all the time. Never use a memory stick or stiffy disk to open and save files from and to. Rather copy and save the file to hard disk first and then open the file in word or whatever before saving it back to where you opened it from. Then AFTER closing the program that you were working with eg. Word, use windows explorer to copy the file from hard disk back to the memory stick. This way ensures that you have a copy of the file on the hard disk if you lose your memory stick or if it goes bad. I’m not sure about the more recent versions of office but in the past if one wrote/saved a file direct to a stiffy disk/memory stick and then ejected that disk/stick before closing the program, then at a later time when trying to open the file, problems would arise and often the file could not be opened.