I've been carrying around a USB flash drive for a couple years now, and I've gone through three of them. I bought a 1gb USB2.0 flash drive two years ago at Kirk Office Equipment and it set me back $260CI. That's close to $350US. It lasted about a year or so, and then I forgot it was in my pocket and put it through the washer and dryer. Miraculously, it still worked... sort of. It was definately on it's way out though and sometimes took three or four insertions before it would show up and read all the data. It was time to replace it.

I replaced it with another 1gb drive, this time with a SanDisk Cruzer Mini which is nice and tiny. I picked it up at the Tiger Direct outlet store on Flagler in Miami for $74.99US. Yesterday I was looking at Tiger Direct's website and they had TWO gigabye Sandisk Cruzer Minis on sale for $69.99. Im not out of space on this one yet, so no need to upgrade... for now!

A few months ago I started using a program called Pass2Go which is a portable version of Roboform which remembers and autofills all your passwords for you and keeps them all protected via a master password. it works really well and launches itself when you plug it in and removes itself when you plug it out again, so it's a "zero-footprint" program. The only problem is that while you're using the browser, not only is the computer keeping your history and temporary internet files, but it's also written to the index.dat file in your temp. internet files folder as well, and that just doesnt go away.

The solution to that is portable Firefox. Im using the one built on version 1.5.0 although there is a newer version available for it now, too. I even managed to install the Universal Adapter for Pass2Go on Portable Firefox after a few attempts so now I have all my passwords (regenerated as 12 random characters) with me wherever I go. All I have to do is remember the one "master" password (which is a 15 character 'strong' password, but it's only one) and it keeps track of all the GH6ylu*76Vw type passwords for all my webmail, website, message board and online RSS aggregator websites for me. I also have a quick proxy setting changer so that when Im connected in an untrusted network (wifi hot spot or whatever) I can quickly flip on proxy settings to tunnel back to my computer at home and surf (slowly) through that connection OR on my laptop, I can connect a VPN tunnel from my laptop back home through my DD-WRT-upgraded Linksys WRT54GS. Adblock Plus is also a given install but bears mentioning, too.

All the data stored on my drive is encrypted as well with a little program called TrueCrypt that also has a USB drive version. It's  beyond the scope of this post to go into ANY detail on TrueCrypt, but if you want to learn more about it, click the link and check out their website.

I also have portable versions of FileZilla (FTP) SlingPlayer (for connecting to my Slingbox back at my parents house in Vancouver), Skype's U3-compatible client and the Trillian portable client for IM as well. There's even a portable version of OpenOffice.Org so theoretically, I could carry around all my data AND the apps to run them on one USB drive and jack in to any computer anywhere I happen to be, with or without Administrator priveges and be able to get things done.