For printing stuff in college or sharing files with someone near you nothing beats a USB. Quick and easy.
Yeah. Except it's formatted in fat and your file is larger than 4GB, oops. So you reformat in NTFS, but now the guy with the Mac can't write to it. USB is fine, but the lack of FS support is a PITA.
exFAT works everywhere for me.
Not on Android.
Plenty, you can get killer USB3 flash drives now. USB3 really is the Dropbox moment for flash drives.
Agreed. It takes <60 seconds to back-up all my personal files to a reformatted USB3 thumb drive I can stash in a safe. I only ever use them from one PC. Dropbox is good for collaborating but I think the "use from any device" benefits are a little bit overplayed. How many PCs and cell phones do people really do work on?
I have a desktop and a laptop that I use regularly, plus a work laptop. And I teach in a classroom that has a PC in it, so I regularly access Dropbox from 4 separate machines, not counting mobile devices.
Many people don't even know you can plug in a thumb drive on a phone or tablet, so if you're going to transfer files back-and-forth between just two devices, you pretty much need a syncing software.
It's funny, until I read your comment I didn't realize I would ever actually consider buying flash drive again.
Yes, but only for Raspberry Pi(s), GoPro(s), and to boot from to install OSs.