One of the most common questions I’m asked in class is, “should I save this to my USB drive?” I have never answered the question with anything other than an affirmative.
It boils down to the value of my time. The last USB drive I bought cost $20 and it holds 2GB of data. A typed page is about 2k if left in ASCII format. A typed page uses about 0.00002 dollars worth (two thousandths of a penny) of space on my USB drive.
If my time is worth a few dollars an hour, it makes sense to save everything I take time to create. I draw the line at five minutes. If recreating something takes more than five minutes, I save it on my USB drive. If it takes less than five minutes, it might not be worth getting the USB drive out of my pocket, plugging it into the computer, waiting for the security software to load, typing my password and navigating the folders to find the file.
Otherwise, it gets saved.
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