There are machines that still use floppy disks as their only method to transfer on/off the machine. By machines I mean expensive hundreds of thousands of dollars research or production machines.
FelipeFelop@discuss.online 7 months ago
An interesting point not touched upon is that the types of people using USB sticks has changed. Because the use of technology filters down from tech savvy, to general population, to people late to the scene or can’t change.
We are in that last stage now. They are buying by price and so easier to take advantage of.
lemmyingly@lemm.ee 7 months ago
aniki@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I haven’t even found the need for a thumbdrive outside of flashing firmware and storage devices. All my documents are on google drive.
tiramichu@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I use them for:
They definitely don’t get as much use as they used to, but I’m still using them.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Also in a business context you need them to play displays on screens at conferences usually.
And students I imagine will frequently use them to print documents at the library, or design students at the print shop
FelipeFelop@discuss.online 7 months ago
In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.
The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.
In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.
randombullet@programming.dev 7 months ago
Yeah I agree. I have a drive running Ventoy and that’s about it.
Also if I’m moving a lot of data. I’ll use a NVMe enclosure to speed up the transfer instead of network.
Rhaedas@kbin.social 7 months ago
Be sure to have backups and not that sole location. Same is true of any physical drive, but at least a drive failure might be recoverable. A cloud storage can just be gone one day.
vanontom@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I think of “thumb drives” as portable flash storage + USB. “Portable backup drives” have taken its place for me. Incredibly fast (NVMe + USB-C), quite small (M2 card size + case), durable (same as thumb drives), growing sizes (1-2 TB affordable).
I keep my old flash drives for smaller things like bootable apps, fresh OS installs, firmware updates. I definitely have no need for mystery off-brand storage though.
TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.org 7 months ago
Play music in a car without using Bluetooth. Boot a computer for setup. Bring pictures/videos somewhere to display without having to rely on other people's wifi. Infect computers with malware without realizing.