Have you ever headed out to do a presentation using slides, knowing that you just made a last minute adjustment to them and, as you arrived at your destination, realized that… Oh horrors… you left the thumb drive in the desktop on which you were working? I have seen it happen, and I have a bit of a horror of having it happen to me.
Of course, if you have the program on your handy laptop, that is not a problem, but in some cases the equipment at your presentation location requires a thumb drive. It may be that even having your presentation in the cloud does not help. The hustle and bustle of preparations for an event, or the urgency of other people who need the equipment for their presentations immediately before or after you can make access impossible. So, hoping to avoid the panic-making experience of giving a presentation without slides, when it actually depends on the slides for its effect, I have developed a very simple system…
My solution to have two thumb drives, A and B. When preparing a presentation, if I make an update on one, say A, I immediately take it out, put it with my presentation equipment, put B to the computer’s USB and save the new version to B as well. Now I have my presentation on both thumb drives, and one of them is with the bits and pieces that I know I will remember to take with me.
If I make another change, I just rinse and repeat… save it to B, put that with my gear, return A to the computer and immediately save the updated version onto it also. I repeat the process as many times as I make major changes to whatever project is involved. Yes, it is slightly tedious, but it is also very valuable insurance.
Following this process, no matter which thumb drive you might accidentally leave in the computer as you rush out heading for your presentation location, so long as you have your other gear, you have the most recent version of your presentation along with you.
Of course, if you leave EVERYTHING behind… I can’t help you.
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