I’m a travelist (professional traveler) focused on China, so everything I carry leads a hard and portable life: in pockets, backpacks, and bags; on trains, buses, and bikes. Rough and often not very clean, dusty or wet.

I’ve used a series of Mac PowerBooks and Duos, then iBooks with OSX. The past two years, an EeePC 901 running Linux, and I’ll be moving to an EeePC 1018p as soon as it arrives.

For backup, I’ve used floppies, Zip and Orb disks, and CD-RWs. Currently (past five years) I leave a portable HD at home with a mirror of my computer at departure. Traveling, I use flash memory. Started with memory cards and a PC slot adapter, then moved to USB flash drives, and now use micro-SD cards and a tiny USB adapter. Wow, what an improvement over the earlier methods!

In China, I can pick up the adapter anywhere for less than $1. I see them around in the states for $5. My most recent micro-SD is 8GB, cost me $8 in China, and with a little searching I can find them online for about the same. I have seven or eight of those now, mostly 2GB and 4GB. Again, I don’t pay much attention to the brand: I buy the cheapest.

I made a tiny wallet out of plastic business card covers, holds all the microSDs with room in each pocket for a tiny note. Stuck the whole thing together with double-sided tape… A cute girl sighed at my fumbling attempts and helped me stick it all together, a bonus! I carry that little wallet in my money belt, it has about the bulk of five folded US$100 bills: Nothing.

I read and hear reports of flash memory and USB drives failing: I’ve never experienced it, but… So I do rotating BUs every couple of days: I always have a number of BUs, each a couple of days older than the previous.

I don’t use any backup software, just wipe the chip and copy my documents folder to it. Takes less than five minutes… I update the note while it’s copying.

I use the (very) old 512MB flash drive when I use Internet cafes: I keep it loaded with Portable Apps. If I pick up some malware from the public computer: well, it’s a small drive, doesn’t have much on it.

Hope this helps!

1. The ones with small caps that are held on by the USB connector. These caps press against the USB connector when you have the thing in your pocket, which means over time, they flex the connector and eventually break it. For example, the first and fourth ones on your list fall into this category.

2. Awful ones that lack any protective shell at all (and often lack activity lights, so you end up getting massive data corruption rather quickly). I’m speaking specifically about the second one on your list.

3. The ones with caps that get lost. Without a cap, you get dirt and pocket lint in the connector, and life is not much fun. I’m thinking, of course, of the LaCie above when I say this, though there are plenty of others with this problem as well.

4. The ones with no cap at all that either slide or flip. Because there’s nothing keeping dirt and lint out of the connector… you get the idea. At least these are moderately robust if you don’t mind de-gunking them once in a while, but they’re still not that great.

A good flash drive should look like the old C10 style Kingston DataTraveler drives, but made of metal instead of plastic, with a sturdy latch to keep the cover from falling off every time you pull it out of your pocket.

Alternatively, I’d settle for a screw-on cover tube like the XtremKey or the Survivor. They’re not ideal from a design perspective, but they’ll do.