Gadgets, gizmos, and tools to help make you more productive in business

USB memory flash drives are great to have.  When you enter into an office, you’ll see them hanging on someone’s neck.  Business professionals bring them around due to several reasons:

• Presentations
• Meeting notes
• Reports
• Software / Executable files
• PST folders containing emails and appointments
• and even music

One habit employees have is to lend their USB keys to colleagues, in case the other one needs to copy some documents.  Some borrow it because they don’t have one.  I say, STOP!

I’ve seen so many files being copied by another employee and placing them into their own hard drives, without the owner knowing.  Sometimes, those borrowing them have no intention of stealing anything off it, but just couldn’t resist anyway.  Let’s face it. We’re all curious of other people’s work.

So you have 2 options:

1. Explain politely that you can’t lend your USB key and offer that you send them the documents through email, place it in the shared drive or do it yourself.
2. If you really have to, then encrypt all of your files.

Lastly, make sure you have a back up copy.  We tend to be so busy and running to and fro, we will eventually forget it in the board room.  Now, we don’t want THAT to happen.