@xrobevansx: It's too keep all the files together. It's sort of like downloading a directory (folder).

btp

I never understand why such small files must be zipped to download. Under 2.5mb? Why zip it?

xrobevansx

God bless people who can remember that less than two decades ago, we were able to do all this stuff using apps that took that much space.

greasypigstudios

Adam, could you please address the safety/security issues behind carrying around your whole digital life on a thumb drive? Do these apps have some kind of baked-in backup scheme? The idea of having all of my important data on a portable device, frankly, excites me and scares the crap out of me in equal measure.

adumbguy

For carrying around a whole flash drive, I would much rather put a qemu of DSL (linux) or even burn the iso to the flash drive 50 Megs for an operating system that you know is more secure than the windows machine that you would be using with all the features. And if that is too heavy for you, theres always google docs... I have yet to run into a computer without an internet browser.... but someday i might
/me knocks on wood

daybringer

When I worked on 4 or 5 computers reguarly through the week, I had my little (!?!?) 2gb flash drive with a small install of Gentoo linux in a virtual machine, and had VMPlayer on all the machines. Was great! Even had my IDE and what not in it. But in leu of that, you can get a 2gb for around $10 these days (According to TigerDirect in my inbox), and portable apps has everything I need on the go including Firefox with Tor, thunderbird, encryption (Both of the drive and a stand alone program), vlc (For when people insist on only having windows media player) and a host of other things that makes my life easy.

It's to the point now that when I travel to visit family, I don't even bring my laptop - since all I need is email and internet on the go, I just bring my flash drive.

shockwaver

@adumbguy: the Portableapps.com version of Toucan ensures you can both backup your drive and encrypt any/all data on it with relative ease. A definite must have if security concerns you.

portobello_man

pretty awesome they can put all of those neat tools into 2.5 MBs if you ask me.

mm_dominik

This seems like a good idea. It is unfortunate that so many of these little programs break so many fundamental rules of interface design, though. I find it hard to imagine that doing so would've saved very much disk space.

willywag

Can anyone explain how to do Linux on a thumbdrive?

I have used Qemu several times but never figured out how to make my changes to the Linux OS persistent. I use Linux 100% of the time at home.

Can anyone share how to boot into my thumbdrive and into Linux? I see the boot option on my computers at work, not sure how to set up the Linux image...

I'm a heavy (daily) user of PortableApps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera Portable, Pidgin, and Weather Watcher). I have also found some very useful extras like CCleaner and "System Information for Windows".

Thanks.

busbodger

I generally use a combination of my USB thumb drive and Jungle Disk. I can easily back up any local data files to JungleDisk , which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and supports encryption. There is also a portable JungleDisk version which can run straight from the USB device. I'll have a local copy of my data safely stored in a Portable Apps installed on the USB device, along with some other great utilities like Password Safe, and all of my data is duplicated in the cloud...works pretty well.

RockAndRollProgrammer

@busbodger: [www.pendrivelinux.com] many distros w/ directions for Qemu & bootable (If the machine can boot from USB) options

barmellin

The set of program are quite good for a road-warrior. However a major problem exists because the files that the applications save are not compatible with other formats.

How I wish authors could just standardise and save everything in a common format e.g. rtf or csv or xml.

Nice to transport, but hell to convert.

roddersg