Software Roundup: 7 Utilities to Get the Most Out of Your USB Drives
Most people use USB drives only to store their data; however, these drives are capable of doing more than just holding your data. These drives can help you installan entire operating system on your device, can contain your digital certificate, and so on. In the following roundup we have seven utilities from our Software Discovery section that will help you get the most out of your USB drives.
While some of these utilities will help you create a live USB installer, others will help you secretly copy data from a PC to the device. Let’s check them out.
1. USB Grabber
USB Grabber is a software for transferring data from a PC to your USB storage, without asking a questionor for permission, as soon as you plug it into a USB port.
- Grab as soon as you connect to the USB storage
- High speed search engine
- Grab without permission
- Hide grabbed data in your USB storage
2. USB Capture
USB Capture is a service-only application that copies all data (files and folders) from a USB to a local folder immediately after the USB device is plugged in, keeping the same folder structure.
- Automatically copy all data from a USB device
- Use wildcards to exclude specific USB devices
- Windows event log
- Lightweight
- Service-only application
3. WoeUSB
WoeUSB is a simple tool that enables you to create your own USB stick Windowsinstaller from an ISO image or a real DVD. It contains a GUI and a command-line tool to help you create an installer.
- Create a bootable USB from real DVD or ISO file
- It supports GUI and command line operations
- Multiple bootmodes supported
4. UNetbootin
UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions without burning a CD.
You can either let UNetbootin download one of the many distributions supported out of the box for you or supply your own Linux .iso file.
The tool is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Can create a bootable Live USB drive
- Can download Linux distros for you
- Supports ISO files provided by you
- Can be used from command line as well
5. YUMI
YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) is the successor to MultibootISOs.
It can be used to create a Multiboot Bootable USB Flash Drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, disc cloning, diagnostic tools, and more.
It uses syslinux to boot extracted distributions stored on the USB device and reverts to using grub to Boot Multiple ISO files from USB, if necessary.
- Create multi-boot USB drives
- Files are well organized in the multiboot folder
- Open source
6. Etcher
Etcher is a powerful OS image flasher built with web technologies to ensure flashing an SD Card or USB drive is a pleasant and safe experience.
It protects you from accidentally writing to your hard drives, ensures every byte of data was written correctly and much more.
The supported operating systems are most distros of Linux, macOS 10.9 and Windows 7 and later.
- Validated burning
- Hard drive friendly
- Beautiful interface
- Open source
- Cross platform
- Faster burns and simultaneous writing for multiple drives
7. MultiBootUSB
MultiBootUSB is a cross-platform software written in Python which allows you to install multiple live Linux on a USB disk non-destructively and also provides an option to uninstall distros.
It is the world’s first true cross-platform multi boot live usb creator for free.
- Cross Platform – Bootable USB created in windows should work in Linux and vice versa.
- Open Source – Anybody can use, modify and redistribute if they wish.
- Linux Distributions – Supports many distros and still counting. There is no pre-configured distro specific files included in MultiBootUSB.
- Python – The entire code of MultiBootUSB is written in Python.
The above utilities will definitely help you explore more features that your existing USB drive can provide. Our Software Discovery section contains these and plenty of other apps that help users like you make tasks easier. Check it out and let us know what you think about it.
