If you’ve ever had a laptop stolen or watched a hard drive melt, you know how devastating a data loss can be. A Swedish professor almost had the displeasure of discovering that feeling when his laptop was stolen. Then, a week later, he got a thumb drive in the mail, containing all of his data.

Yes, the laptop thief loaded all of the stolen data onto a drive and sent it to the victim. On the day of the theft, the thief also left behind the professor’s credit cards and some cash, all of which was in the laptop bag from which the computer was taken.

When asked about the incident, the professor simply told Swedish press, “this story makes me feel hope for humanity.”

The title of this post is a little misleading. USB 3.0 has been out for a while, there just haven’t been many peripherals to support it. Several firms finally released USB 3.0 products today, and though they are certainly cool, certainly fast, I certainly won’t be buying any of them.

Why? That’s my question, actually. Why would I? There is precious little I need to drop onto a thumbdrive these days. Even the raid arrays that launched today are fairly unappealing. My main storage device is attached to my router, and I do nearly all of my backups over the air, which USB 3.0 isn’t going to improve. Documents? Pictures? I have Google, Flickr, Facebook, insert-cloud-storage-of-choice. The days of carrying around the few things I really need on a thumbdrive are long gone, replaced by the convenience and security of offsite backups in duplicate or triplicate.

Don’t get me wrong, USB 3.0 will be around and become increasingly prevalent over the next several years, but my guess is the general public will hardly notice. The one thing consumers understand about the new transfer technology is price, and it’s a price that’s hard to justify when it only gives you faster transfer rates on hardware connected devices.

Kingston’s new 16GB thumbdrive is $89. The 64GB, a whopping $270. A USB 2.0 64GB stick can be had for half that price, and when the holidays roll around, likely a fifth. I can think of precious few consumer applications that would require the 60Mbps write speed that USB 3.0 will provide. So few, in fact, that I couldn’t even name one.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got way too much media. More movies and music than one person can possibly consume. There is a strange appeal to that kind of digital hoarding. It’s actually what prompted me to set up my first Network Attached Storage device. Technically, things have been made a bit easier for me with the help of Apple’s Airport Extreme, but anyone can put together a NAS of their own for enjoying content as far as your network will reach (and often beyond).

Gizmodo put together a guide for getting the most out of your NAS that I thought was worth sharing.

Getting a NAS set up as a simple file share is mostly a plug-and-play process. (More on that here.) And in raw form, it’s a dead-simple concept: Here’s a bunch of storage space that you can share among your home computers, over the network. But with a little work, you can do so much more than that, converting your NAS from a begrudging purchase in the name of caution to a vital piece of your very computing existence.

Take a few minutes to check out the ways a NAS can change your digital life.

The Disney Store sounds like a store for kids, but don’t forget that Disney has its hands in a lot of different cookie jars, including many us nerds love to eat from. Take this Iron Man thumb drive for instance. It’s about as cool as thumb drives get, and though it’s a steep $40 it would look great protruding from your new laptop.

Who better to protect that valuable data than Tony Stark, right? The device only comes in a 4GB version. Product description is below:

Trust Iron Man to keep all your important data — movies, music, photos and files — safe and secure. Our Iron Man 2 USB Jump Drive is a flash memory data storage device that stores up to 4 GB with Marvel™ superhero style!

Those are legal movies, music, photos and files, people. Legal.

I’ve been a big supporter of SLAPPA ever since I reviewed my first backpack from them in 2006, and though it might seem like we’ve done nothing but blindly promote their products since then, the praise has been well deserved. In the four years since receiving the Velocity SPYDER Pro for review, the bag hasn’t exactly been treated with tender loving care. And yet, despite being jammed to capacity (and beyond) and dragged through airport security more times than I’d care to count, it still looks brand new. In other words, it definitely held up its end of the bargain in terms of quality.

Nevertheless, when SLAPPA offered to send over their new M.A.S.K. custom build backpack for review, I jumped at the opportunity – not because I needed a replacement, but because it offered something that their other bags (and to my knowledge, no other bag on the market) didn’t: customizability. With the M.A.S.K., you build your bag from the ground up, like choosing the color of your inner lining and selecting removable faces that offer different looks and functions. For instance, the KOA features three pockets perfect for a camera, some extra lenses, and a few other accessories, while the High Five is a more traditional, all-purpose front pocket. Better yet, they’re a breeze to take off, so if you need to switch faces on the fly, it’s as easy as zipping up a jacket.

To make each bag even more unique, you can also personalize the inside with a wide variety of removable inserts (15 in total with a promise of more to come in the future) ranging from SLAPPA-themed prints to original artwork. And since they’re attached with Velcro, they’re easily interchangeable, especially if you remove the face of the bag beforehand. In addition, the M.A.S.K. boasts the ability to go straight through airport scanners, although I wasn’t able to test if it really works. Then again, the chances that a TSA agent will actually let you go through without removing your laptop are pretty slim, so I’m not too sure how helpful this feature will be to those looking to cut a few seconds off their travel time. You’re willing to try, however, because if SLAPPA says that it works, then I’m inclined to believe them.

After all, this is the same company that swears by the quality of its products, and they haven’t disappointed yet. The M.A.S.K. is water resistant, puncture proof, and nearly indestructible (I was tempted to light it on fire but was afraid I’d burn down my apartment in the process), and it features more room than most people know what to do with. If there’s anything negative to say about the bag, it’s that it’s a little on the bulky side, making it a questionable carry-on item depending on just how much stuff you’ve managed to cram inside it. That’s hardly a bad problem to have, especially when you consider that the SLAPPA M.A.S.K. will not only endure years of abuse, but can change along with your individual needs as well. And with that kind of value, it’s easy to see why we’ve become such loyal supporters.