First, turn around. You’re sticking the USB drive into the cat.
They tend to be on the side or back of laptops. They are on the back and sometimes front of desktops. They will be a rectangle about 1/4 inch high and 1/2 inch long. Computers tend to have at least 2 of them if it is a newish computer.
A USB port is where USB devices are plugged into computers. Data can be transfered over these ports. USB also provides power from the PC to the devices allowing cool little self power things like the USB thumb drives we are discussing. You can also here them refered to as flash drives or pen drives.
This is a picture of a computer. A Sony computer isn’t it pretty. There are lots of fun places to plug things in here. You see the 3 rectangles in the middle those are USB ports.
If this is not helpful enough you will need to consult the manual for your PC.
Another pic of USB ports:
http://support.gateway.com/s/Astro/3500600/USB.shtml
Also, note that a USB drive will not really help you share text with the publisher, unless you send the drive via mail or whatever.
Regarding breakage: They’re pretty sturdy. Camera memory cards have been retrieved out of airplane crashes, for example, and I’d imagine that the USB cards are also resistant to breakage. Essentially, your computer is more likely to break than the card is. Just don’t do something like stick it in the port and then try to snap it off.
Regarding losing it: Well, that’s what physical security measures are for.
What a flash drive is: Look at the first link I gave. It’s a little doohickey that you plug into your computer and can save stuff on, kind of like a floppy only better. I keep one on my keychain–it’s a couple inches long, about 3/4 inch wide, and about a quarter inch thick. The version I have holds 512 MB, which is a bit less than a CD. Mine cost about 60 bucks.
Where it plugs in: See the links that the other folks gave. Look for a port on your computer with that little branchy symbol next to it. Plug the drive into the port. If it doesn’t go in, flip it around and try again–they only go in one way.
How it works: Plug in the drive. A light may come on on the drive itself, and your computer may show a message that has discovered a new device (or something to that effect). Then open Windows Explorer or My Computer and you’ll see a drive called something like “Removable Disk”. That’s your USB drive, and you can now just save files onto that drive like you’d save onto any other drive. When you’re done using the drive, look in your system tray (in your taskbar next to the clock) and hover over the icons till you see one that says “Safely Remove Hardware”. Click that icon and you’ll get a list of hardware that you can remove–your drive should be in that list. Click the item for the drive, wait for the message saying that the hardware is removed, and then pull the drive out of the USB port.
Can you save onto it over and over: Yep. However, when I’m actively working on a file, I typically save the file locally (onto the PC’s hard drive) and then copy and paste the file onto the USB drive when I’m done. This is because the hard drive is faster than the USB drive (kind of like saving to the hard drive is faster than saving to a floppy, but the USB drive is still faster than a floppy).
Thanks! I guess I better get two of those; keep one at home and one at work. I’ll probably have to call one of my more computer-literate friends the first time I use it (“drag who into the what with the where now?”). Then I guess when I get the book done I can just FedEx the whole flash drive to my publisher.
Still dunno why they got rid of floppies . . . Technology marches backwards . . .
Just to satisfy my curiosity. What is the problem of emailing the file to the publisher? If you were willing to contemplate online storage the reason shouldn’t be a slow Internet connection. You can still use CDs to send to the work to the publisher.
They got rid of floppies because they sucked. They were terribly unreliable, Easy to damage. I am not sure the ultimate reason they got rid of them but I suspect it is a toss up between Steve Jobs thinking that the made the Imacs look uncool or 1.44 Mbyte is just not that big any more.
My little Samsung flash drive has been run through the washer and dryer on accident, about half a dozen times. It never even blinked, though it does have some scratches here and there. I understand that a camera flashcard even survived having one of the WTC towers falling on it (the photographer was not so lucky, sadly. I honestly think you’d have to do something deliberate to break one.
Here’s a crazy idea. Buy a floppy drive. They still make & sell them, along with the disks. Get a friend to put it in your computer for you.
If you don’t have a spot for it in your computer, you can get an external USB floppy drive. A drive you can put floppy disks into, but hooked up outside your computer to one of those USB ports they’ve been talking about above.
Try these links:
http://www.nextag.com/All--PRICE-Under-30--a-Floppy+Drive+Interface--USB–a-Storage+Type--Floppy+Drive–zzusb+external+floppyz1zB3mz5—html
Good luck.
With software like InCD (or DLA, which may have been included with your computer), you can write to CDs just like floppy disks. You can even use it with “one time only” CD-R media, although you won’t be able to free up space by deleting files from those discs. Once you’re done with the disc, you can finalize it, so anyone can read it even without installing InCD.
I use Bigbluehost.com, which rents me 100 Megs for $4 a month. They provide access to a very easy to use free FTP software. You can upload your stuff in document files, and then access them with your FTP program, or any browser for viewing. Not much on keeping folks from looking at it, but it is pretty safe, since they back up every day. I think now days you can get about twice that much. For text based needs, you can’t write enough to fill that up too fast, and they have larger plans too.
Tris
Eve Do not spend money to fix a problem that doesn’t exsist. Online storage is not your only answer, knowledge is.
Let’s look at it this way. What are your specific problems?
I assume the first problem is that the computer you are talking about doesn’t have a floppy drive. As opposed to the problem being you not being able to find floppy disks. (You can still get floppy drives and floppy disks - the 1.44 MB type)
It sounds more to me that you don’t know how to use “save” vs. “save as” on the hard drive; and/or the 'write and leave session open" vs. “write and close disc” part of saving to CD’s. Whether the CD-R(Compact Disc-Read Only) type OR the CD-RW (Compact Disc Read and Write) type. DO NOT attempt to write to any CD “every few paragraphs” or you will be frustrated. (Unless you get specific software, and maybe even then). CD’s are great because of their permanence, capacity and transferability, not their .00001 second write time.
You can still save to your hard drive “every few paragraphs” and at the end of the day ( or every few hours), save the final file to a CD-R or CD-RW. If you are also worried about power outages corrupting your hard drive - then your answer would lie in the direction of an Uninterrupted Power Supply.
" “goddam one time only” CDs" - This sounds to me like the crux of the problem. If you are talking about CD-R’s, then in a sense, yes they are one time only. In the sense that they can only be written to and not erased to be used again. However, their capacity is usually around 650 MB to 750 MB, which would be the same as roughly 450 floppy disks to 520 floppy disks. You can write to them sequentially however. If you have been writing to 1 CD ONCE and then trading it out for another CD, then - hooo-boy right there is your problem!!!
You seem to be talking about text files, which are really small comparatively. Any CD should be able to hold hundreds of books worth of text files. If you are talking about sound and picture files also, well that means more CD’s, but still not to the level you seem to be implying. Basically I’m saying that your difficulties can be addressed using the hardware and software that you currently have. If you want to upgrade and get USB flash cards, etc. feel free.
I realize this does not address the " I can just have my publisher access the text, w/o having to e-mail it to them or get them CDs." problem. But I was mainly concerned that you would fix a problem by throwing money at it, rather than learning about it.
I second VegemiteMoose’s advice about backing up itereations of your files on to rewriteable CDs, that will give you backups and you can write an awful lot of text files to a CD. I think later versions of Word have a versioning function to help you keep track of edits and etc.
A USB flash drive is a handy way of moving files between locations … I have one because I work between home and my office and it’s much more useful than having to burn the files I want to CD all the time.
Gmail is a good option for backing up your files off-site, and I’d recommend you do something like that anyway, just in case. Yahoo Briefcase is OK, but the people you share files with need to have Yahoo IDs as well, which can be a nuisance.
And you already have your website so you have online storage space. There are two ways of doing this I think, but people should jump in an correct me if I’m wrong about it.
Generally your website will have a directory where “public” files are held. So, for example, my site has a directory called 'html", and files I want publically viewable are placed there. I think different set-ups might call these something different, i.e. “public” or whatever. But if you access your website by FTP of any kind, you should be able to work out where you public files sit.
But you’ll probably have access outside that directory as well, and you could store files there.
However, if you want to share files, you can simply drop them into your public folder and not link them to anything else on your site. Theoretically they are publically accessible, but only to someone who knows they are there, and knows what the file is called and the structure of your website (I’m assuming we’re not talking about top secret documents which are likely to be hacked by enemy agents or something equally dramatic).
I do this when I want someone to access a file which their email program coughs at … I upload the file to the website, and simply send the address of the file to that person. The address might be something like:
http://www.mysitename.com/filestogo/unguessablefilename.doc
The person at the other end just clicks on the URL to download the file. It might not be as secure as password protection, but it’s very workable.
Your ISP or whoever hosts your site will be able to tell you all about how to access via FTP if it’s not something you’ve done before. WSFTP is available for free for educational purposes … it’s a limited program but works perfectly well.
The other option is to use set up a Gmail account and give your publisher the username and password to access it. As long as you use the account only for that purpose there’s no risk to your privacy. Or you could use your current ISP … my account allows me five email addresses, so I could set one of those up to share if I needed to.