Inside an undisclosed building on campus, past two big doors — one with a reminder that you’re under surveillance — then down a narrow hallway, past another door with blinds on the window, behind the front desk and inside several cabinets and drawers are the jump drives left behind, lost or forgotten by hundreds of current and former NIU students.

“It’s rare we have a day when somebody doesn’t lose one,” said Charles E. Schumann, Jr., IT manager of academic computing operations and support.

Before a student who has lost a jump drive can find out where this location is, they will receive an e-mail sent to their NIU account. That’s if the student’s name is found somewhere on the drive.

Lab attendants collect lost jump drives at ITS-operated computer labs and bring them in at the end of their shifts. ITS employees then try to identify who each drive belongs to by checking to see if there’s a name on the actual drive — this is rare — then by checking for an “owner.info” file on the drive and then by looking at files where the student’s name would be on the top, such as homework assignments.

Ryne Moen, a senior political science major, praised ITS’ identification methods.

“It’s probably the best way to do it,” he said, adding that students need to make sure their e-mail address is on the drive.

If students can’t be identified, the drives sit in drawers or bags with hundreds of other unclaimed drives. They are separated into bags by whether the drives have lanyards or not. Employees also put them in boxes, separated by color and brand, time permitting.

“We keep all of this semester’s and last semester’s, and anything else is gone,” Schumann said. “We used to keep them for a year but we ended up with so many of them, it was impossible to manage.”

So far this semester, in just over three weeks, 85 jump drives have been left in ITS-operated labs as of Monday afternoon. That averages to just over four a day. The drawer containing this semester’s lost drives looks a little light, but that’s because a lot of people have been claiming their drives lately, Schumann said.

Schumann said as drives become more inexpensive and students have their data stored in more than one place, students care less and less about losing them.

Freshman business major Ryan McCullough makes sure he doesn’t lose his by keeping it in his pocket whenever he’s not using it. But he does admit that it’s small and easy to misplace.

Even before jump drives came into fashion a few years back, Schummer said NIU students found a way to lose their files.

“We used to have that problem when we had floppy drives,” he said.