Daily Cup of Tech has a great how-to on putting a program on your USB drive so it can “ask for help” if it gets lost… – “Hello, My Name Is USB Drive – The very first thing that I thought of was to put a luggage tag on my drive. This seemed like a pretty good idea on the surface since pretty much every single USB drive comes with a lanyard and/or keychain attached to it. Why not put on a luggage tag in it’s place?
Unfortunately, the luggage tag was too bulks and took away from the convenience of the drive. I then put label with my name and address on the drive but there was so little space on it that it was hard to get my entire message on the drive. There had to be a better way.
Use The Tools At Your Disposal
I then got thinking that the USB drive has a lot of storage space. I could easily fit an entire novel on the drive. A “Send Me Home” message should be simple.
I figured that if I created a text file with instructions on how to return the drive on the drive root, the finder would probably be able to open it and read the instructions…” [via] – Link.
2 thoughts on “HOW TO – Have your lost USB drive ask for help”
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A somewhat related idea for digital cameras: you can take a snapshot of a message that will tell how to reach you if the camera is lost (when the person that found the camera will view the pictures taken).
I, for instance, simply took a low-res picture of a computer screen with the message prepared in pbrush.exe (in a full screen mode).
Note: of course it is possible to create the “lost message” image file and load it into the camera, but I’ve known at least one camera that would have trouble displaying images created outside of the camera.