How to run your favourite desktop utilities from almost any computer using Portable Applications

In the course of my day, I use two or three main desktop and laptop com­puters in two or three dif­fer­ent parts of the city.

And yet, work­ing on dif­fer­ent devices, I still have access to a core set of tools and util­it­ies that I find essen­tial to my daily work. Here’s how I do it.

Some of the com­puters are ‘cli­ent’ man­aged, so I don’t have com­plete con­trol over the soft­ware suite I have avail­able to me.

There are two options that I use, though I find myself mov­ing to one more often these days.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me write a little bit about the applications.

Port­able Apps
One of the import­ant fea­tures I look for in a tool or util­ity is it’s abil­ity to ‘stand alone’ or be ‘portable’.

To quote Wiki­pe­dia:

A port­able applic­a­tion (port­able app) is a com­puter soft­ware pro­gram that is able to run inde­pend­ently without the need to install files to the sys­tem it is run upon. They are com­monly used on a remov­able stor­age device such as a CD, USB flash drive, flash card, or floppy disk.

And the beauty of a port­able applic­a­tion, is that any cus­tom­iz­a­tions or applic­a­tion set­ting tweaks made on one com­puter are avail­able to all your com­puters as they’re stored in the applic­a­tion folder, as they would be if the pro­gram was ‘installed’ in the tra­di­tional way.

In my case, the port­able apps I use are text edit­ors, sys­tem net­work tools, file trans­fer tools, and image editors.

My first solu­tion
In the past I used USB flash drives a lot. It was easy to plug them in and have imme­di­ate access to the pro­grams and data I needed.

The sys­tem worked well, just plug in the drive, nav­ig­ate to it and the pro­grams I need, and I’m in business.

Unfor­tu­nately there’s a bit of a down­side to these thumb drives:

• need to be encryp­ted to ensure the data was safe in the event the drive was lost or stolen
• always scanned for mal­ware upon inser­tion into the com­puter, and occa­sion­ally that hung the computer
• needed to back up the data should the drive be lost or stolen

My cur­rent solu­tion
Drop­Box is my go-to solu­tion. Sure, any Cloud stor­age solu­tion would do, but for me Drop­Box is the cat’s paja­mas. Here’s why:

• when installed onto the sys­tem, the Drop­Box folder is avail­able to all com­puters added to your account
• all applic­a­tions and data copied into the local Drop­Box folder are imme­di­ately copied to the Drop­Box folder on all the other com­puters attached to my Drop­Box account
• backup cop­ies of the data are auto­mat­ic­ally stored on all com­puter sys­tems I use regularly
• data can be encryp­ted for safe stor­age in the cloud

And here’s how it works for me. My home com­puters and one vir­tual work­sta­tion at my client’s loc­a­tion have the Drop­Box cli­ent installed.

When work­ing from home, I simply store my cli­ent work in the appro­pri­ate folder on Drop­Box. Then, when at the client’s site, just open up the same folder and files on my vir­tual work­sta­tion and carry on.

And, if I’m at a cli­ent site without an installed Drop­Box, I can eas­ily access the data or apps by log­ging in to Drop­Box’s web interface.

If you’re look­ing for another solu­tion, check out Sug­ar­Sync.

3 things that make this work
My solu­tion is obvi­ously depend­ent on a few things to work optimally:

• Installed Drop­Box on all my systems
• Inter­net access
• Applic­a­tions that are developed for ‘portability’

Oth­er­wise, I’m back to the mod­ern ver­sion of ‘sneaker-net’ with the USB drives

This works for me, but what about you? How do you com­pute in mul­tiple locations?

And if you’re look­ing for some port­able applic­a­tions to get you star­ted, check out PortableApps.com

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This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my Life­style Tech­no­logy art­icles here.

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Tagged as: application folder, applications, computer software program, customizations, Dropbox, flash drive, image editors, Internet, Laptop, Lifestyle Technology, malware, network tools, Portable Applications, Portable Apps, PortableApps, Program, removable storage device, software suite, text editors, USB, USB Drive, utility, Working