Put A Bushel of Apps In Your Pocket With Low-Cost Pocket Drives

Are you using a pocket USB drive to store applications and backup data? If not, the time is ripe to do so. This past weekend I was noting some of the remarkable deals available for these, where very little money buys you enormous capacity. You can now get 32GB pocket drives for well under $100, and if you haven't researched the kind of open source and freeware arsenal that you can keep on these drives, it's worth doing so. Here are just a few good, free resources you can take advantage of with a pocket USB drive.

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.

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.

With our wireless connections and advanced networks these days, putting applications and operating systems on a physical drive may seem like a step backwards, but it's actually very convenient, especially if you use a lot of mobile devices. Recently, I've been struck by just how much capacity you get on the latest thumb drives. They're worth a look.