Well, so I thought. It was T minus 5 days before the Blogher Conference. The weekend came and went and I didn’t think about my drive until the following Monday (3 days before the conference.) I searched high and low for my drive , in my bags, in my clothes, at my client’s workplace and and my place. I went to my Gram’s and back and my building super asked me if I lost a computer disk. I was so relieved since all my presentation materials were on this drive. The first thing I did was to back up my USB drive to my web hosting company. Then I opened up a Mozy account. The lesson here, backup often!
Now its your turn, Tell me your technology horror story, by commenting to this post. The most horrific story will won win a 128MB drive coutesy of BlogHer and AOL Body, which will contain an ebook copy of Get More Business – The Women’s eMarketing Guide to Promote Your Products and Services on the Internet.
Maybe this will interest folks here. I have started the Honey Stick Project; an experiment on “a day in the life of a lost USB drive”, more or less.
I’m systematically dropping USB drives preloaded with harmless files that track what people click on when they find them.
um…scot…i’m pretty sure you call those key loggers, and their not so harmless then, what about privacy? those poor people (who are probably stealerers for not returning it anyway)
Actually, my Honey Sticks are NOT keyloggers. They don’t have any software on them whatsoever, and do can not harm a computer, if used. However, the point is, that this is a way of measuring how safely people handle USB drives. In general, it is risky to use a device when you don’t know where it came from. It’s like picking up a piece of pizza off the street and popping it into your mouth.
The Honey Stick Project measurements are done by simply detecting when somebody opens a file on the device, which causes the user’s browser to load an image from my website. It can’t collect any personal information, just the fact that the device was used, for statistical purposes.
It’s funny you should mention that people would just steal the devices. It turns out that after doing about 30 devices, 40 percent of them were used, and only 10 percent of them were found by people who tried to contact me to say they’d found it. So, you’re right. Most people who find them do keep them.