Around fifteen years ago, USB flash drives were all the rage. As a portable means to store digital files and to transfer them from one computer to the next, thumb drives were compact, convenient, and downright ubiquitous in the consumer tech space.
The USB stick's heyday may be in the rear-view mirror, but that hasn't stopped me from personally carrying around a unit in my backpack, even in the year 2025. Here are three reasons why I've yet to part ways with this trusty, classic storage medium from the 2000s.
For security reasons
Better safe than sorry when it comes to digital files
While it's true that the flash storage used within most typical USB sticks is of relatively low quality (and thus more prone to data corruption than something like an SSD), these drives are still excellent for conveniently carrying around additional backups of important files.
As my colleague Kelsey Fogarty references in her foolproof back-up plan for keeping memories safe, my personal mantra is that "redundancy is key when it comes to preservation." In other words, the more duplicate copies there are of an important file, and the more dispersed said file is across various storage drives, the more safeguarded it is against the inevitable malfunctioning of any particular piece of hardware or equipment.
For financial reasons
USB sticks are a dime a dozen these days
When USB flash drives first released to the public, they were a fairly expensive proposition. Over time, however, as the cost of flash storage plummeted, smaller-sized USB sticks became far more affordable, and new, larger-capacity options began to flood the market.
These days, 2GB and 4GB USB thumb drives are so affordable and pedestrian, that they're hardly mass-produced anymore; larger-capacity models with 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and higher of storage are well within the reach of anyone on a budget, and so they make for an accessible backup storage solution.
For nostalgic reasons
Thumb drives fill me with all the feels
There's no denying it: as someone who grew up during the reign of the USB stick, these small pocketable storage drives hold a special place in my heart. When I pick up a flash drive and swivel its case open, I'm flooded with memories of crafting Microsoft PowerPoint presentations using my school's computers, and then taking the files home to continue to work on them via my family's home PC.
Sure, USB sticks aren't as miraculously tiny as, say, microSD cards, and they aren't nearly as fast as external SSDs, but they're shaped and designed in such a way that evokes a strong and unwavering sense of nostalgic.