Some apps run quite slowly off USB drives, Firefox being a notable example that I use a lot. What I normally do is copy the app to the desktop of the machine I am using, run it and then copy it back to the USB drive when finished.
That way it runs at normal speed, and with Firefox you can even have a disk cache if you set it to clear on exit.
Problem is that copying back to the USB drive is quite slow. Most USB drives have very poor write performance. The best solution I found is to use a file synchronisation tool to only copy files that changed. The problem is that there do not seem to be any that are portable and have the necessary features, such as automatically selecting the desktop and USB drive as sync targets and running from the command line with progress bar. Secure file erase would also be useful, to clean up the desktop afterwards.
A nicely integrated but simple and robust program to do this would be ideal. Run large apps from HDD nice and fast, and the quickly sync when finished. Simply copying FF3 back to a normal MLC flash drive takes 5-10 minutes, but syncing takes
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And one thing I would like to point out is that even though you delete it from the hard drive people could still recover it using a special program. So that kind of ruins the security of your data....
iLike Macs, iPwn, However you put it... Apple is better ^_^
"Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world..."
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A nicely integrated but simple and robust program to do this would be ideal. Run large apps from HDD nice and fast, and the quickly sync when finished. Simply copying FF3 back to a normal MLC flash drive takes 5-10 minutes, but syncing takes
Have you considered just pushing the profile folder back to the flash drive? That's the only thing that changes.
Why bother doing the whole thing?
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
Sure, I know that, and in fact that's what I normally do, but it's still much slower than just syncing the changed files. I use WinMerge at the moment but it's not ideal for the task.
OK, good that you do only the profile. That shouldn't take 10 mins unless you have some awfully slow hardware.
You can use Toucan to sync the hard drive profile back to the flash drive profile. It is a backup/sync tool where WinMerge is a file comparison and merging tool.
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com