When you’ve spent hours, days, weeks, even months working on a specific project it can be a horrendous moment when the message appears on your screen saying that you’re out of disc space and you can’t save your work – what are you meant to do? Many people choose to leave their computer on until they have to email or print it, but that’s going to use power and do the machine no good, so you need to find an alternative.
You have the obvious option of course – go through the hard drive and delete the files you no longer need. However, you could spend hours deleting the small and no longer relevant files only to discover that this major project still needs more space so you have to start again, hardly ideal. Instead, think outside the box and look for alternative and external storage, including cloud software and flash drives from somewhere like USB Makers so that you can not only save your work, but edit it anytime anywhere and even create backup copies by cloning software.
So what’s a USB flash drive then? Sounds pretty cool in terms of the name it’s been given, but many people who are aware of them take them for granted. These small devices are usually rectangular in shape and about the same size as your house key, but capable of storing tons of data so you can take it home, to work, on the train, on holiday, anywhere that you’ll be using a device with a USB drive. Best of all, you can customize it so that you can easily distinguish between your own device and the person working next to you – you don’t want to go home with their drive when your major assignment is due the next day!
This has proven to be immensely beneficial for the sort of people who do work on major projects, either as part of their profession or for their University course for example. You don’t want to be restricted to the one device, especially in an era where people have numerous different machines from desktops to laptops, right down the scale to tablets and smartphones that are great for cloud storage apps.
Which leads me nicely into a second solution – the cloud. No I don’t mean the big white fluffy things in the sky, although that’s essentially where it’s stored. The cloud is an online storage solution that means you don’t store anything at all on your machine or device, and you can access it by logging into a specific platform or app from any computer or smartphone.
Finally, you have something very similar to what you’ve already been using, only you can actually see this one. An external hard drive plugs into the main computer like you would any auxiliary device such as speakers or a mouse, only it provides you with a “second hard drive” that is portable so you can still carry it to work, except you wouldn’t have room to use it on the train like you would a USB drive.
