Hi. I've noticed that a lot of portable apps I've tried to install on my USB stick involve a lot of small files, which inflates the size of my apps quite a bit on the stick.
For example, Portable Firefox 1.5 with the extensions I installed comes in at 19.5MB, but size on disk is 22.7MB. Portable GIMP is even worse. Size is 17.5MB, but size on disk is 30.5MB, and it uses over a thousand files! Uniserver is almost as bad as Portable GIMP, too. 800-something files and going from 17.2MB to 27.3 MB. The whole Portable Apps folder I installed from the latest release (minus the old version of Portable Firefox which I deleted) goes from 197MB to 252 MB and uses over 5000 files! To contrast, a portable version of Ad-aware I found but have yet to use only has 8 files and only goes from 2.48MB to 2.56MB.
Is there any good way to mitigate this beyond just hoping for the developers to create a version that uses fewer tiny files?
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Not unless you want them zipped on the key and unzip to use and copy back. Which introduces all kinds of other issues. (what if you crash, etc)
The size is a limitation of the file system on the key.
And there's almost no away that developers of say Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, etc will re-engineer to save 10% of install space for the very small percentage of users that use their apps portably.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I have quite a few portable apps (including GIMP) and my folder is:
597MB
615MB on HDD
(not a major difference IMO)
It's possible that the cluser size on the USB drive was set to something high, like 1024 or 2048 bytes. The extra bytes that do not get occupied from a file add up. Try formatting your drive with a 512 sector size, and you should see a slight decrease. You won't save much in the way of room, though.