10 Easy Steps to More Useful and Secure USB Pen Drive

USB Drives are really useful for transferring your precious data across multiple computers, it can even store your confidential data for as long as you want and you can even rewrite anything again and again, so lets make it much more useful and secure by following below mentioned 10 easy steps.

1. Adding Icons & Labels to USB Drive – you can easily add personalized icon and label to your USB drive using the "autorun.inf" file and placing your preferred icon in your USB Drive.
   1. Copy any icon.ico file to your USB Root Directory.
   2. Now Open Notepad and add below code in it.

      [autorun]

      label = "<your name here>"

      icon = "yourIcon.ico"

   3. Just rename the .ico file with the name of the icon you have pasted in your USB Drive and rename the label too.
   4. Now save this text file as "autorun.inf" and place it in the USB Drive with that icon.
2. Adding Start Menu to USB Drive – you can download portable apps software and create a well organized start menu right on your portable USB drive, you can take away everything like Firefox, photo editing software and much more.So head over to PortableApps.com and grab that free software.
3. Using Mojopac for Operating System – Mojopac allows you to carry that same operating system environment with you where ever you go. You can easily start your normal work on any computer and the best is that it does not leave any traces for your privacy.
4. Write Protect your USB Drive – you can normally these kind of USB drives that be easily write protected, but if you own an old USB Drive than ThumbScrew can help you out in write protecting your USB Drive. You can download there software and install it easily, so with one click your USB drive can be write protected.
5. Make Autorun.inf Read Only & System File – Thumbscrew can only precent your USB to be write protected if that software is installed on that PC but if it is not installed than you need to make sure that your Autorun.inf file is read only so that other PC viruses or other stuff cannot harm that file.
6. Automatically Disable Autorun – if you are connecting your USB Drive to your PC and you think that your USB drive might be infected with viruses, than make sure to Hold down Shift Key while attaching your USB drive to temporarily stop "Autorun" from popping up, this can save your from getting virus transfer.
7. Encrypt your USB with Truecrypt – if you own confidential data on your drive on regular basis than should use Truecrypt to encrypt all data on that drive. It is free and really efficient.
8. Sync your USB Drive Easily – if you often synchronize your data from one to another than you should have a perfect tool to complete this work, for this SyncToy an awesome little tool from Microsoft comes in, just download and install this tool and you are good to go with your syncing.
9. Backing up your USB Drive – its really important to take USB backups when ever possible, now you cannot carry a huge backing up software with you every time so here comes "Toucan" a portable app than can easily backup and restore data on your USB Drive just grab it and install it.
10. Install Bootable Linus – if you love Linux than you should surely make your USB drive bootable for Linux, just download PenDriveLinux and enjoy booting Linux anywhere and surfing the whole web easily.