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Do you have a USB based portable drive? Chances are that you do. That trusty little USB Flash Drive (or Data Key or whatever the name is nowadays) in your pocket right now is an example of a USB portable drive. These little nifty storage devices is probably the reason of the death of the 1.44” floppy diskettes. Gigabytes of data in your pocket – anytime, anywhere.
Besides using it as just another media for carrying around your files – with the advent of some software and some creativity, these little devices can really sort out your digital and computing life.
In this article we will discuss some important aspects of using your USB portable drive:
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Synchronization – easy way to keep your all files up to date
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Computing on the Go (lightweight style, minus the weight of the laptop) – How to run your applications right off the USB drive.
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Security and Encryption – protecting your sensitive data, should your portable drive gets stolen.
See how you could put your portable drive to good use, read on…
Nowadays with the notebook computers coming down in price, they sure are getting all popular. Because the computer has become such an important tool for communication and work you can see more people lugging these two or three pounds notebook computers wherever they go. You see people computing in cafes such as Starbucks and Coffeebean. On the street you see business people and students shouldering laptop bags as they head towards their destination. Notebook has made computing portable indeed.
Face the facts; the notebook is not exactly lightweight. What with the accessories like power adapters, extra batteries and such that you need to bring along as well, the final weight and the size of your laptop bag can be considerable. Depending on your physical fitness, after walking a couple of hundred meters you may suddenly wish that you don’t have to carry it with you. Well maybe you don’t…
There is another way. For the times that you don’t wish to carry your laptop with you but still may want to get a bit of computing done you can carry just your USB portable drive. Most of the common communications, internet browsing, multimedia and common business and office applications can be carried and executed from your USB drive. Feather weight computing – all in your pocket!
The idea is to pack what you need most in your USB drive, put it in your pocket all the time and you can have access to your customized computing needs (browser bookmarks, address book, chat etc.) anywhere, anytime. All you need is an access to a PC. With public PCs more common nowadays such as cybercafés, internet kiosks and hotel business centers, access to a PC need not be a problem.
This method is not a replacement for computing with the notebook. Rather, it is an alternative for the times that you don’t want to carry the notebook with you bu
t still would want to have some computing done. For example, if you go on an out-of-office training, maybe you could just put the applications you need on the USB drive and use the computers provided by the training center to do some communication or work in between lessons – you don’t have to bring your laptop with you. Or during shopping, you just want to pop off and have a quick chat using your favorite messaging software or check on your mail with your usual email client and setup. You could even carry your USB drive with you all the time for the just-in-case needs and carry your laptop PC only when necessary. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.
Ok, first some definitions. I mentioned USB Portable Drive and NOT specifically USB Flash Drive in this article. By USB Portable Drive, we are talking about any portable USB based storage device. In the broadest sense there are two types of USB portable drive as discussed here:
 USB Flash Drive
These are the small key-holder size data storage devices based on NAND flash, small enough to carry it in your pockets and tough enough to face normal jolts and abuse; since being NAND memory based, does not have any moving mechanical parts. Storage capacities of these types of drives are in the gigabytes range nowadays with the current upper limit of around 8 gigabytes and growing.
USB Portable HDD-based drive
These are basically a small notebook type 2.5” regular hard drive enclosed in a small plastic/metal casing with a USB interface. When plugged into the USB port of your PC or laptop, it appears as a large external drive. Being hard disk based, the capacities of these drives are upwards of a hundred gigabytes, with about 170 gigabytes the current upper limit. These drives are also much faster in terms of read/write speeds compared to the USB Flash Drive above. However because of the mechanical nature of these drives (which is still basically a hard-disk) they are less rugged compared to the solid-state flash based USB flash drive.
Both types of drives would work for the types of use that we are going to discuss in this article. The deciding factor for you is speed vs. ruggedness. The tradeoff is a personal choice.
File Synchronization
Okay, here is the scenario. You edit a couple of files in your office pc and then decided to complete the work at home later. So you copied the files that you have decided to work on at home later into your USB portable drive (lets just call this a USB-drive in this article) and go home. Sometime later, when you’re sitting in front of the home pc, you decided to work on some of the files off the USB-drive. You edit your work and saved them back into the USB-drive.
The next day you go back to the office and since you don’t need the files you’ve edited on your USB-drive yet, you worked on other stuff - other files in your pc. Later that day, you decided to bring some files from work back home again.
Oh no! Now you have some new files in your work pc and also some new files in your USB-drive as well (remember the work you did last night?). So now you have to carefully copy the new files from each drive to the other (and vise versa) such that you don’t accidentally overwrite your latest work on either drive.
This is a tedious process if you are going to have to do this everyday. It is also possible that one of these days you’re going to overwrite something important in the process. With the larger capacity of current USB-drives into the gigabytes, you may have hundreds of files in your USB-drive. This makes the process of manually synchronizing your work in your office PC and the USB-drive tedious and error-prone. Fortunately with the help of some software, we can sort these synchronization problems with click of a few buttons:
 SyncToy from Microsoft Powertoys (screenshot on the left). This piece of software, available free from Microsoft allows you to setup multiple folders for synchronization. It also has multiple modes of synchronization:
Synchronize – new and updated files are copied both ways. After this process, both directories (on your office pc and USB-drive for example) will contain the latest files from each side.
Echo – One folder is the master folder and the other is the slave folder. All changes in the master folder is duplicated on the slave folder. However if you edit any files or make changes in the slave folder (or drive) it will not be reflected back into the master folder.
Subscribe – This is the reverse of Echo, where updated files on the slave folder is copied to the master.
Contribute – New and changed files from the master folder and copied into the slave. Nothing is deleted in the process.
Combine – New and updated files are copied both ways. For files which have been renamed or deleted in either folder, there are no changes.
Once you’ve set up a synchronization between say a particular folder between your office and the folder on the USB-drive and select Synchronize as the synchronize mode, all you have to do each day is to plug in the USB drive in the morning of your workday and once more in the end of the day and use SyncToy to perform the synchronization effortlessly.
Your Favorite Applications – On the Go
Do you lug around your notebook wherever you go because you might just want to do a bit of work when out of the office or home? Sometime dragging around 3-4 pounds town can be such a drag. But there might be a better alternative for you – just bring your USB drive with you, in your pocket, and forget about the notebook! If you live in a place where PCs are pretty common and accessible – this method will work out for you. With places like cybercafés, hotels, airports and even shopping malls offering access to the internet via a public PC, access to PC may not be a major problem, especially in a medium to large town or city.
Using Your Applications On The Go
The next thing is the software applications. Things like word processing applications, music players, web browsers, email, chat software etc. are the list of common applications that we use. After using these for a while, we may have a list of settings, bookmarks and favorites that we need and sometimes take for granted. Have you ever had the sinking feeling when sitting in front of a web-browser in a cybercafé and groaned as you remembered that the link to the website that you need was in a bookmark in your PC at home. Why not bring all the applications that you need with you, together with your favorites, bookmarks and settings right in your USB-drive? Life on the go gets better and better. Now you can have your files (synchronized, off-course using the synchronizing tips above) and also applications with you in your pocket!
Enter the world of PortableApps™. The nice people here have created a suite of open-sourced applications that will run right off any portable drive. Thanks to the hard work of the portableapps team, there is now a long list of applications that can run off your USB-drive. Visit [http://portableapps.com/apps] to see the list of applications available. PortableApps comes in several pre-packaged suits that integrate together with an application launcher, making it very user friendly. However you can also configure it with only the applications that you want.
These applications have typically been shrunk down somewhat such that they are a practical fit on a typical USB Flash-drive (or thumb-drive). To carry your applications and typical data with you, a USB-drive with the capacity of a gigabyte would work well. Of course a larger size would be okay too – you can simply fit more applications or your data.
Something to note here is that the applications here are not of the usual staple from Microsoft or other big commercial companies. However they can usually work on the industry standard files such as MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint files, image files such as jpg, gif and media files such as AVIs and MPEGs.
A short list of what you can do:
Office Documents editing
OpenOffice.Org is a full featured office suite capable of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. It can open typical Microsoft files so compatibility with your office or home applications is high.
AbiWord is a standalone word processing application. From it’s website: AbiWord “is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for a variety of word processing activities and has the ability to read and write a number of document types including Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Open Document (pre-installed), RTF, HTML, Palm and more. It includes grammar and spelling checkers as well as an array of other handy features including mail merge capabilities. It also has a plugin system allowing you to add features with available add-on plugins”
Internet Browsers
Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition is the application to use when browsing the web. It is a fast, full featured browser that is likely to meet and exceed all your browsing needs. It also has a large array of add-ons that you can use to extend its functionality.
One of the more useful add-ons that you may want to install is Google’s Browser Sync for Firefox. What this nifty add-on does is that it uploads and store all your bookmarks and stored passwords in an encrypted form onto a server online. When you’re using another PC to browse the web with Firefox, these settings are downloaded by the browser. This is useful if you have a PC in the office and another at home or installed in your USB-drive. If both is setup to use Firefox then all your passwords, histories and bookmarks can stay synchronized all the time. Isn’t it nice to have a bookmark that you’ve created when browsing with your office PC to be instantly available when you are browsing using Firefox Portable edition in your USB-drive or your PC at home? Google claims that all the bookmark and password information stored on their servers are encrypted and are inaccessible to anyone except the owner. That is good to know.
Messaging Applications
If internet chat is part of your life, you can make it portable too! Pidgin Portable is a multi talented messaging application that allows you to connect to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and Jabber messaging networks all at once from a single application – right from your USB-drive! Pidgin is easy to configure and use. It also can be made secure by installing a plug-in called Pidgin Encryption [http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/] to encrypt your conversation to the other party. Also when you use Pidgin portable directly from your USB-drive, it does not leave behind any personal information in your host computer. This is important if you are working off a public computer such as a cybercafé or hotel’s business centers. The drawback however, is that it may not support some of the specialized features of the particular network. But chatting on the go, from your USB-drive is a reality!
Email Clients
Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent email client for the USB-drive on-the-go road warriors. Quoted from it’s website: “Mozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that's easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more. Plus, the portable version leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your email and address book with you wherever you go”. What else is there to say.
There are many other applications that can be integrated into your USB-drive and carried around with you wherever you are. The list includes graphics editor such as Gimp, CDROM authoring software, media player such as VLC Portable and Adobe PDF file reader such as Sumatra PDF viewer. If you are a programmer, you can find text and code editors, terminal emulation software available as well. For a bit of fun there are even games and emulators such as the ‘ole DOS Box – made portable for you!
Security
It is sure liberating to be able to carry all your necessary data and favorite applications wherever you go. This freedom comes with a caveat – security. Now that you carry all this personal information with you, what if your USB-drive gets stolen? Someone else now has access to all your personal information and many a sleepless nights you’d have to spend wondering what it going to happen and how the thief will use your information. Off course the best thing is to not lose your USB-drive in the first place. Keep it in your most secure pocket and be careful with it. The next thing we can do is to make sure that if stolen, the thief won’t be able to access the information inside.
What we can do it to encrypt our USB-drive such that only with the right password we can access the contents and run the applications that we’ve installed.
Truecrypt is one such software. According to its website, this clever piece of software can do all these:
Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
Encrypts an entire partition and storage device, such as a USB flash drive or hard drive.
Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
1) Hidden volume (steganography – more information may be found here).
2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).
Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: XTS.
The website documentation has a more complete introduction to its encryption strategy and also a step by step guide on how you could install it onto your portable drive.
In order to maximize the portability factor, Truecrypt should be installed in a special mode called the ‘traveler mode’. There is a special ‘traveler disk setup’ tool built into the software to create this type of USB-disk. Using the traveler mode means that Truecrypt does not need to be installed in the host system in order to access your USB-disk. This is a big deal when you are using host PCs that don’t necessarily belong to you.
The only limitation with this software is that you need administrator privileges in your host PC in order to run it. This means that this solution will not work in most public PCs such as cybercafés. This is can be a major problem for most and severely limits the ‘portability’ of your USB-drive solutions.
 An alternative solution would be to put your sensitive documents into one or a few folders and use folder/file level encryption software such as Remora USB Disk Guard. This software will run without administrator privileges as it does not need to write anything to the system registry.
As such, this software is truly portable as you can run it from your USB-disk sitting in your favorite cybercafé. All you need is the privilege to run external applications.
However, this software is not an on-the-fly system as Truecrypt discussed prior to this. You would need to select files or directory that you want to encrypt and actively decrypt the files or folders prior to accessing them (and do remember to encrypt them again after using or accessing your files and folders). However the software is straightforward and easy to use.
Once installed into your USB-drive (choose your root of a folder in your USB-drive during installation as this will make access to the software easy), you will see the file usbdiskguard.exe in the root of your USB-disk (or in the root of the folder if you choose to install into a folder instead). There will be another folder called Remora USB Disk Guard created to store the other files that it needs to run.
Usage is straightforward. Once you’ve plugged in your USB-disk, just click on the usbdiskguard.exe file to execute it. It will initially run as a system tray icon. Double click on Remora’s tray icon and enter the password that you’ve selected during installation. The application will open like the picture immediately above:
Just click on the respective icons to encrypt file, decrypt file, encrypt folder or decrypt folder (in that order left to right) that you want. In the options dialog you can change the logon as well as the encryption password should you need to alter them from time to time (a good practice).
Before unplugging your USB-drive, just remember to encrypt all necessary folders or files that you’ve decrypted for access earlier, exit the Remora’s control panel and safely unplug your drive. In practice it is quite straightforward and simple.
Speed Concerns
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are two main types of USB-drive. Once based on a notebook type 2.5” hard-disk-in-a-box and another much smaller (in physical size not capacity) based on solid state flash memory (USB-flash drive).
If your primary use is mainly carrying data and documents around, the USB-flash drives are excellent choice. As small as a key-chain and lightweight, you can carry them anywhere. Just install the file or disk encryption software discussed above and you can have security as well. Install file synchronization software in your home or office PC and your files in the USB-flash disk will always stay up to date effortlessly.
However as compared to the hard disk based USB-drive, the USB-flash is slow.
If you’re intention is to run applications as well (and why not, since that is the key to computing on the go, feather-weight style) you have 2 choices. Buy the fastest USB-flash that you can afford or use the hard-disk based USB-drive solution. The latter will always run your application at speeds similar to those executed from the PC’s internal hard disk drive. The former will be a trade off between the need for small size (HDD based solutions are larger, typically wallet size compared to USB-flash which is key sized) and sacrificing execution speed. Speed of course also depends on the type and size of the application that you run. If the application tends to access the disk often it will noticeably slow down when executed from the flash based USB-flash drive.
The choice is really a personal trade-off on your needs and wants. If carrying a wallet-sized hard disk based USB-drive can be considered portable enough for you, then this is the best. You have capacities in the hundred gigabytes for all your files needs and applications ran as fast as they’d have from the internal PC’s hard disk. Just bear in mind that they are not as rugged.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this article has given you an insight to the possibilities of the humble USB-drive beyond the just-another-place-to-store-your-files (or simply a replacement for the obsolete 1.44” floppy drive). With some inspiration, creativity and some web search, you can surely find other applications that can be useful for your needs. The USB-drive can be the key to taking personal computing with you without the weight.
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