Take the Time to Safely Remove Your Device

It is the end of the day and you have been stressed from the days workload. You're ready to just go home and spend some time with your family. As you're leaving, you remember you left your USB drive connected to your computer. Do you just disconnect it and stuff it in your bag or do you spend the time to safely remove it?

Did you know that if you don't safely remove your USB device, you could potentially damage any data contained on that device? Not many people do. If you decide to just unplug your USB device from your computer while its exchanging data with your PC (knowingly or not), the data that was being exchanged while you unplugged the device can become damaged.

Think about it this way. Let's say you're working on a shipping dock and filling a freight truck up from a conveyor belt. The driver for some reason is in a real hurry, and without paying attention decides to just take off, with the bed unfilled, with the door still wide open. As he's driving away a couple of boxes marked fragile fall out and you actually hear the glass shatter in the box as it hits the ground. If the driver had taken the little bit of time to at least close the door before he left, filled or not, those boxes would have never fell out of the truck.

You might be saying to yourself "Why all the trouble? I always unplug it without going through all that hassle and nothing has ever happened to me." Well, simply put, you've been lucky. How many times have you forgot to close your trunk or tailgate of your vehicle only to discover it when you got to your destination? Luckily nothing fell out this time. How many times have you seen stuff laying on the road that's fallen out of other peoples vehicles? Chances are a fair amount. The point is, it happens.

Even if your device never suffers a data loss issue from this, you can still damage files on the PC, like a program accessing information from the device. What if the conveyor belt (program) was the type needed to be physically attached to the truck (device)? What happens when that driver takes off now, even if nothing falls out of the back of the truck?

We strongly encourage you to take the time to properly remove your USB device. The process is simple. Look for an icon in your system tray (this is located on the bottom right hand side) that resembles the end of a USB cable. You may have to expand the tray in order to see it. When you click on the icon, a window will open giving you the ability to "Eject" the device. Upon doing so a tooltip will appear telling you it is now safe to remove your device. If you get into the habit of doing this, it will become second nature and never slow you down.

In order to ensure smooth running workstations and eliminate downtime, its highly recommended that you communicate this process to all of your employees. For more best practices about how to improve your businesses efficiency and data protection give Computerware a call at (703) 821-8200.