Portable Memory Sticks

What is the best way to duplicate a USB Flash Drive?

I am in the process of indexing 3000 documents contained within a 14GB USB Flash Drive. I want to make a copy (or two) of the flash drive so that I can have more than one person 'indexing' different sections at the same time. Thanks for the suggestions

Public Comments

1. Copy the contents to the hard drive. Copy from the hard drive to flash drive. You could connect another flash drive and copy drive to drive.
2. Create a directory on your PC, copy all the files from your USB drive to the 'pute. (If you're going to be doing this regularly, and you're using a Windows PC, search online for "synctoy" to help automate this process) On your PC, copy and paste the directory - this will make a backup of the first directory, usually called something like "Copy of <name of first directory>". You now have 2 copies of the files on your PC - personally, at this point, I would choose to make one my "working" copy (where I do my actual work on files, etc) and the other as the backup. I keep the backup copy as it was when the files came from the USB stick. I realise you still have a copy of the files on your USB drive but copying 14GB from USB is so painful I'd want a backup on the hard drive just in case something goes wrong. If you need or want to split out the files in the working directory, for the indexing helpers, simply create a new directory for each helper within the working folder and drag and drop the files. For example, if you have 3 helpers - Sam, David and John, create directories "Sam", "David" and "John" and drag 1/4th of the files into each, keeping the last quarter for yourself to process. For indexing, I'd look at Archivarius 3000: I've used this to index a 80GB directory of .pdfs and it is really a life saver. Very fast for finding files later too - with full text search.
3. Save the files to an Office Live Workspace. Each Workspace is free and allows for up to 5GB of files to be stored (I know you will have to set up a few) but once the files are uploaded to a Workspace, the files can then be viewed by those whom you invite to the Workspace. It also tracks versions and actions taken within the account so when multiple people are working on various files, you can ensure that you are not duplicating work. Cheers, Jeff MSFT Office Live Outreach