TNR Tip: “physically” label your external drives

For our first TechNest Report weekly tip, we talk about… hard drive organization the old-school way!

I don’t know about you, but I have a few external hard drives that I use on a regular basis.  Some I use for backing up specific machines; others I use storing ripped DVDs (that I purchased, of course).  And yet others I use for transferring large amounts of data between machines.  Whatever the use might be, I have found it very practical to physically label my drives.  I have given these external hard drive labels the following attributes, as you can see below:

• Drive name
• Capacity
• Format
• Contents (optional)

What’s in a name?

This might seem a little out of the “ordinary”, but I give unique and distinct names to my external drives.  This way, I can call a drive by name and automatically know the purpose that it serves in my digital life.  Moreover, naming my drives and then putting those names physically on them lets my friends and family know exactly which drive to take out of my “tech drawer” when it comes time to watch a movie or when I call home asking to be sent a specific file that’s stored on a specific drive.  (I usually don’t take all of my drives with me, so let’s hope that this is a rare occasion.

The moral of the story is that if you have a multitude of external storage devices and want to easily remember what’s on each drive, give your drives unique names and physically label them.

PS: the physical labeling part is a temporary solution, of course, until technologies like embedded e-ink get to be mainstream.  Until then, I can dream of displays like these taking the place of my Avery sticky labels.

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