New Options Available for Mobile Open Source Apps on USB Drives

Are you using a pocket USB drive to store applications and backup data? If not, the time is ripe to do so. You can get entire sets of useful open source applications in one download for free on a USB Flash drive, and the drives themselves offer a lot of capacity now for very little money. Here are just a few good, free resources you can take advantage of with a pocket USB drive and a few minutes to do a download.

We've written before about the PortableApps suite of free, open source applications that you can put on a thumb drive in one download. The applications are top-notch, and include backup utilities. You also get quite a lot of open source software titles, including OpenOffice, Firefox, anti-virus software, and much more. 

Now, PortableApps has released an update build of its suite of open source applications available in one download, ideal for mobile use via a USB Flash drive.  PortableApps' Platform is billed as "a full-featured portable software menu, backup utility, app store, automatic updater and application management system that ties all your portable apps together and lets you build your own custom app suite."

The ability to build your own custom app suite is particularly notable. You can string useful open source applications together into a suite for targeted purposes such as backup and anti-virus scans. You can execute these on any USB-capable device, wherever you are.

USB drives are also enormously popular for keeping lightweight Linux distros and apps handy. See our previous coverage of PenDriveLinux. It gives you downloads and instructions for many portable Linux versions that you can keep with you on your thumb drive. 

If you use the Mac platform, you can find an outstanding one-download solution for putting open source applications on thumb drives at MacLibre. It works very much like the PortableApps suite, and emphasizes open source titles almost exclusively.

While many people are taking to storing applications and files in the cloud, USB Flash drives are very convenient options for accessing your applications and data from anywhere. Look into some of the one-download options in this post, and remember that all the available applications are free.