As a webmaster and online entrepreneur my entire business if focused on using the web as a marketing tool. For years now I have had a personal computer setup with all the great software that I need to do things like check emails, build websites and promote them.
I chose to use open source applications whenever possible because they are free and updated often. My biggest problem of late has been the issues my computers have been facing. My primary laptop needed repairs for a faulty ac connection and my backup laptop was being used by a friend for his music production.
I started using my moms home computer while I was visiting her. Her first complain was “all these things on my desktop” which were icons for programs I needed. I installed Firefox because I hate IE. I installed Filezilla for FTP access to my servers. I installed Photoshop because I needed to do some graphics work. I installed OpenOffice because she had no spreadsheet applications to use.
After having all of these installed and configured I realized it would be nice to be able to move these newly installed and updated applications to my laptop when it was available to me again. I’ve seen portable applications in the past but paid them little attention until now. Over the last week I installed all of these apps on a thumb drive and tweaked them to run smoothly from any computer.
It was actually pretty easy with the help of PortableApps.com which has a portable version of every open source program you can imagine ready to download and install on anything from a pen drive to an ipod. I have my thumbdrive configured to load Mozilla Thunderbird and cache copies of my most important emails so I can have them available offline if necessary. I setup Firefox with the Google Toolbar and I can now update my blogs using Google SideWiki or ScribeFire if necessary.
With this setup I can actually run most aspects of my business from any web enabled device that I can plug the USB drive into. So if something horrible happens and I’m without a computer for any reason I can just use my thumbdrive at an internet cafe, library or even a friends home to keep up with my business until I am able to repair or replace my own computer.
As an added layer of protection I have backed up the available data and applications on my server so that if I lose the usb drive I can replace it quickly and be back in business with little to no trouble. My only concern at this point is security. I would hate to lose the drive and have my business files and history available to anyone who finds it. I’m looking into encrypting the drive but that seems more difficult than I expected. Anyone else using portable apps to run their business?
PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). The entire platform is open source built around an open format that any hardware or software provider can use.
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