Portable Hard Drives

[Boreas]

I am guessing there is at least one computer geek in this group who might have some suggestions for me.

I bought an external hard drive a week or so ago. It is a Free Agent Go 160, with Ceedo software. My understanding is that I can basically take my desk top with me and use it on another computer easily. I believe I have backed up my laptop appropriately (on BIG reason for buying the thing) and now I want to get some of my programs onto it. I am particularly interested in getting Quickbooks and iTunes onto it. Word would also be nice. I have been able to get some documents and pictures and such onto the hard drive, and can sync them.

If I use my Quickbooks CD will I be able to put that program directly onto the portable hard drive? If I am able to do that, will I be able to sync between that and my computer? In other words, if I do some work on a different computer, will I be able to bring the hard drive to my laptop and sync it so both are the same? I would want to do similar with iTunes, but mostly I'd want it on the hard drive so I could play my music on the other computer. Would iTunes be able to be downloaded onto the external hard drive?

Also, I can surf the net from the hard drive and not leave a "footprint". If I am using a networked computer, would the external hard drive become part of the network?

Thanks for your help. I am sure it will generate a couple more questions.

[Agde]

Hate to pop the bubble, but you'd have to do some really geeky things to get the effect you want. For instance, most programs can be installed to an external drive, but they nevertheless put all kinds of essential things in the Windows registry on the C: drive of the machine where the program was originally installed.

A geeky way around this would be to "image" your drive C: to the external drive and then change the BIOS to boot from that drive, but to "take my desk top with me and use it on another computer", you would also have to change the BIOS in the same way on the other computer. In this scenario, the external drive would become the "program machine" and the two computers would become merely "data storage" and peripheral hosts (eg for printers). Even among geeks, messing with all this is not for the faint hearted.

Your Ceedo software tries to do some of this by creating a virtual workspace that is transferrable between machines by isolating a shared workspace from the environment of the host PC and then dealing with Windows issues. In principle, it should work well with standard office applications like Word, but I have only seen it demo'd and never tried it with things like iTunes..

The bottomline is that most people find it easier to install programs separately on each computer, maintain a similar look, and then use the external drive as the place to store data files to be used by or transferred to various machines. Some programs allow changing the "data directory" to another location (like the external drive) but often nevertheless leave things in a directory on C: drive called \Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data. Again, Creedo supposedly does some of this. Anyway, just simply sync-ing data files (eg.music, photos, documents) is usually the way to go.

On your specific programs, Quickbooks is quite friendly in all this, iTunes has some quirks. On the "footprint" issue, the external harddrive just becomes a drive on the connected computer, so if the computer is networked, the drive follows that computer's network rules (ie. usually visible on the network only if "shared"). Again, if you have Administrator access to both computers, you can change, for example, the Internet Explorer "Temporary Files" directory to be on the external drive, basically allowing you to take your footprints with you. Firefox keeps cookies and things seperate from Windows so is easier to manage. There are perhaps other simpler footprint strategies, such as using CCleaner or connecting through a proxy like Relakks, but ultimately if you are not the network administrator, you can't count on footprint privacy on a network.

Tried to keep short and simple. Hope this wasn't too geeky.

[Boreas]

Thanks Agde. I will have to read it again to really make sense of it, but I do understand most of what you wrote.

I have some questions and will have to think a bit first to figure out what I really want to ask.

[hm0504]

Great answer Agde.

I would only add that if you want to surf the net from a multi-access PC and not leave a footprint, then the only semi-reliable way to do this is to boot the PC with your own OS (e.g. PuppyLinux installed on a USB stick). For example, if you are concerned about a software sniffer recording the password to access your web email, or a screen scraper capturing your banking page, and you do not trust the integrity of the PC's OS, then you have to boot the PC with your own OS.

To take it further, if you do not even want to trust the PC itself, one would have to bring along your own PC -- like one of those nifty Eee PCs.

[NakedGary]

Just buy a USB Flash drive with U3 software on it.

Featured with "Sandisk" "Kingston" and others.

Go look at these links for description and demos:



http://www.u3.com/

http://www.u3.com/#

http://software.u3.com/softwarecentral.aspx?skip=1

http://portableapps.com/apps
.

[atalanta]

U3 sounds too good (or too easy) to be true! Presumably, to download programmes such as Adobe, Quicken etc onto the USB drive you have to buy them, even if you already have them on a home PC or laptop?

[Boreas]

I do have a flash drive with U3 on it. The hard drive has Ceedo. It seems to me they are supposed to do the same thing.

I was in a computer store today and the guy told me I would not be able to load QuickBooks into the hard drive and expect it to be usable since the hard drive does not have an operating system. The computer I would be using would need to have the program on it in order for it to work properly.

He did say that the hard drive is a good back up device.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by atalanta

U3 sounds too good (or too easy) to be true! Presumably, to download programmes such as Adobe, Quicken etc onto the USB drive you have to buy them, even if you already have them on a home PC or laptop?

I have QuickBooks. When I downloaded it onto my portable hard drive, I got a bunch of icons. Nothing usable.

[Agde]

Originally Posted by Boreas

I have QuickBooks. When I downloaded it onto my portable hard drive, I got a bunch of icons. Nothing usable.

Boreas, your Ceedo software is designed to do exactly for your portable hard drive what U3 does for flash drives. Just like U3, there is a limited list of supported programs and there is a more extensive list of programs that work according to experimentation by Ceedo users. As long as you use the Ceedo add-on call Argo (Argo Application Installer), I don't see any reason why QuickBooks wouldn't work, but I took a look at the Ceedo user forum and there was indeed a report of having trouble with Quickbooks, even though Quicken seems to work fine. iTunes reportedly doesn't work because Ceedo doesn't currently support "services" (a special kind of program running in the background). Concerning the advice you got at the computer store, the person clearly didn't grasp that you were working with software that is a step above the norm.

[Centauri4]

Most computer programs are designed to be installed on one computer per "Licensed user". The easy misconception with software is buying it makes you an "owner", this is not true. The fee we pay for software in stores or for a download makes users Licensees only. Some licenses allow the program to be installed on multiple computers for personal use, but they typically stipulate the program only be "used" on one computer at a time. So, the part of this that applies to "portability" is that software is NOT designed to be portable, but rather it is "fixed" like something added to your house.

Quickbooks might support the ability for you to copy all of the "Data Files" related to your records on to the external hard drive, so you can carry this information back and forth between home and office computers, but you should follow their instructions on doing this.

The latest re-innovation of software is Google's Apps but they are simply revisiting an old idea, the "mainframe" (or mainframe-style) computer. They offer a few applications that reside on a central server (theirs) along with the documents or databases you create using these apps. The advantage of this is ONE central computer that can be maintained with security "patches", have its applications upgraded easily (when new versions are ready) and allow the "Host" (that's Google) to retain complete ownership of the programs code. This is by no means a new idea but a turning back to older computer concepts and re-thinking what it takes to keep software working properly and users happy with the overall computing experience. A centrally hosted, web browser-compatible version of Quickbooks or a platform-independent version of iTunes is what you are really looking for.

As computer networks get faster and RAM memory within our desktops bigger, the need for downloading and installing a program sort of goes away. If my network is fast enough and the computer reliable enough, I can download enough of the program into my "local" PC to do anything and NOT have to worry about Spyware, viruses, hackers (well, less anyway), theft of my computer or loss of it due to fire, flood or lightning. A new and improved "Smart terminal" with all the graphical niceties of Windows XP, Mac OS X or some Linux with a more-than-reasonable monthly use fee may be in ALL of our futures, especially the future of our children.

~