After a brainstorming session I have an idea... portable drive snapshots

Obviously what I'm about to suggest could be handled by a separate app and perhaps that's the way to go ultimately... but in my mind this should be integrated into or at least an addon for the portableapps.com platform itself.

So what am I talking about? Well... snapshots combined with an auto-revert feature. A way to revert any external changes to the files on the portable drive automatically.

Why?

Well... I'm a computer tech. Perhaps this is not something that matters as much to others by my reasons are pretty straight forward. I am constantly plugging my portable drive into strange computers that often *are* infected. Add to that the fact that until portable apps launches and then launches my autostart apps (including AV) my portable drive is completely open to infection. Once infected removal may not be possible until I plug the drive into an uninfected system (which has the risk of spreading it... unless it's linux/bsd/mac).

Also, I've worked with ClamAV off and on over the years and I am thoroughly unimpressed. So I'm not willing to rely on that.

There are other considerations too. A search of the forums reveals how often portableapps get "attacked" by whatever antivirus the system they are plugged into has. And before some one says antivirus shouldn't be set to auto-remove that's dead wrong. Many viruses wont sit still while you decide what to do about them. By the time a human can react those viruses will have delivered their payload and removing what the AV detected... if it is even still there... no longer serves any purpose.

Plus I don't have control over what system I'm plugging my drive into... this is typically the whole point of portableapps... taking it from computer to computer. And I don't like the idea of the first thing I do when sitting down in front of a strange computer being that I disable their AV or worse modify its settings. This is what got me thinking about this in the first place as I've had this problem a lot.

And then there is mp3 manager apps that like to assume any portable drive that gets plugged in is for the purpose of transporting and playing music... and creates folders and settings files accordingly.

So then... specifics...

A snapshot system solves all those problems rather neatly. A snapshot of each file would have to be stored for a single moment in time... it should be a (lightly) compressed and (lightly) encrypted snapshot file... and an update snapshot menu option covers updating the snapshot on command... then if a file is modified by any software that is not an installed portableapps.com app or otherwise white-listed the snapshot app makes a note to revert those files (or delete them) when the drive is being ejected. If changes are made to the files on the drive while portableapps.com platform is not running they are automatically marked as "restore/remove when ejecting"

This feature would be disabled by default for a number of reasons. Confusion for novice users for one. Also it would (potentially) double the amount of space taken up on the portable drive and involve a small performance hit when files are modified by "allowed" apps. But for those of us that have need of such a feature it would allow us to turn our portable drives into a mobile fortress from which we could move from computer to computer with relative little risk of virus spread or overzealous antivirus products.

Obviously there are ways this idea could be gotten around by a virus... but most aren't that sophisticated.

Or am I mad as a hatter? Thoughts?

EDIT: almost forgot. I'm not familiar with the process of packaging apps for PA.c but... I imagine installers would have to register their executables with this feature for it to work... or the PA.c platform would have to guess them... ether way this is why I think the PA.c platform is a better choice for handling this than another portable app.