Hi,
I am thinking of buying an IronKey and using PortableApps on it. Does anyone know how well they both work together? That is, are there any compatibility problems installing/running PortableApps on the IronKey?
I dunno why, but somehow I'm under the impression that some problems might arise (possibly because of the hardware-based encryption).
Thanks for any help.
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In theory, hardware encryption should be transparent to software. In practice, that's not always the case (driver issues, etc.), but that's the theory. So I can't see that there'd be any issues running your portable apps off of it.
I have been using portable apps on an IronKey for a few weeks already.
No problems with the hardware encryption and the apps are all working well.
However, the ironkey comes with it's own "launcher" which only supports firefox and IronKey utilities.
It is a little akward to launch firefox from the iron key launcher and all other apps from portable apps. Looking at the support groups at IronKey, it looks like the are focusing on their enterprise products and not so much the consumer version. They were hinting at new software release a while back but still nothing...
In retrospect I would buy it again: it's built solid and it's secure.
I would only recommend to someone able work with the limitations of the built-in ironkey apps. Not to forget the price premium...
1. Install Truecrypt to your PC: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php
2. create a TrueCrypt Volume called data.tc and put it in the USB root.
3. Download this ZIP file: http://www.fortycaliber.org/TrueCryptStick.zip
4. Unzip those contents to your USB Root.
5. Eject the USB drive. And plug it back in. Autoplay should ask to mount the TrueCrypt Volume. Select it and it will create a new drive based on that volume. I made mine the "Z" drive because nothing else will ever be there. Put your PortableApps stuff in that Z drive.
Now you have a 256-bit AES encrypted (or whatever you chose) volume on your USB drive.
is that all your important stuff is in a single file that people that use your flash drive will think it's useless, delete it, and you lose all your data.
No, hiding doesn't help, I've enabled it.
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Why would you lend your flash drive to people that would delete your files?
My dad, my teacher, that person over there that poked a hole in my pencil sharpener not knowing how to use it, that other guy that begs good and is being held back for being stupid, etc.
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that I give out to folks to use. It's 4gb, so it's usually big enough for whathaveyou, like I'm gonna steal all your music from your computer.
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
Well I don't think people should just remove stuff from my drives in any case. I mean I have some weird stuff from strange source files (fla, asm, etc) to files that run only on emulators (like my c64 programming attempts). And having another file for encrypted data like source backups or whatever would not be useful.
But, I suddenly got a weird idea... Make a launcher that opens a text file or something, use CAFE Mod to associate an non existing extension to that launcher and have it not parse the file itself. And have CAFE mod run so when the user double clicks on a file with that extension CAFE will start some editor with a text file explaining not to delete this file. Or just rename the file into "do not delete" or something.
Bottom line, they should not just go and delete stuff from your drive...