Storing portable apps in the cloud is very attractive these days as it is quite easy to login to one's cloud account on any computer and have all my portableapps instantly runable. This is great when remote controlling a PC via TeamViewer, RustDesk, etc. However what happens if one runs the same portable app launcher on both the local and the remote PC simultaneously since they are both sharing the same cloud storage?
I can see that if I was to search the remote PortableApps folder for the app I wanted to run and launch it from the .exe in its subfolder, there should be no problem - provided I am not running that particular .exe simultaneously on my local computer. But it is a little painful to launch apps that way and it would be nice to be able to run the launcher on the remote computer also. There must be some problem with both instances of the launcher trying to share the same local storage of what apps have been launched and so need to be shut down on exit, etc?
Would it be best to have multiple launchers for this usage - ie maybe one in a folder called PortableAppsLocal.com and another in a separate folder called PortableAppsRemote.com? What would be recommended best practice for this usage?
There is also the case that one would want to run the same portable app on both local and remote computers simultaneously - such as my favourite file explorer XYplorer.exe. I guess it is safest to keep two copies, one for local and one for remote use?
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Launching apps from the executable within the base app subfolder is running them in non-portable mode, so you will lose/leave behind whatever settings/data the app creates on that PC - they will not be synced back to the cloud storage, and if the software is installed locally you will overwrite the local version's settings/data by doing that.
Running most of our apps the correct way from the portable executable from cloud storage simultaneously on 2+ computers will result in conflicts, and most likely data loss, because of the way many of them handle their settings/data.
There are a few rare apps where that situation won't have a negative affect, basically because the app has no settings, but they are the exception and not indicative of most apps.
To run our apps from cloud storage you should always only have one instance open, and always give time between closing on one PC and opening on another for the app to store its settings/data, then the cloud storage to sync the changes back to the cloud, then propagate to the other PC(s) you want to run it on. For your situation you definitely should have separate copies to run on each PC.
Thanks for your answer. That is interesting that "Launching apps from the executable within the base app subfolder" is not advised. Having created base app subfolders for a number of apps that were pretty much portable already, I didn't realise the launcher did very much at all apart from simply invoking that .exe. I realise that it does try to keep track of which ones it has started so that it can terminate them somehow when asked to exit. But I didn't know there was significant jiggery-pokery going on to redirect an app's local storage (I guess?) to the portable app's folder. I will create a special cut-down "RemotePortableAppsLaucher" copy for those increasingly often occasions when I want to run some familiar portable apps via TeamViewer or equivalent.
JohnW