Yes, I am Portable Apps happy recently, that’s because I’ve only just discovered it, and it’s also saving a lot of headaches for me which may occur in the future. Today I looked up getting Eclipse working under Portable Apps and what d’ya know? It works perfectly. Personally I followed these instructions to do it with my JDK6 VM (not the latest U build though) and the latest copy of Eclipse and it worked without a hitch.
Setting up the workspace however should – in my opinion – be done slightly differently. Typically you install the applications in a certain folder (usually F:\Portable Apps\ – dependent on what drive letter your OS has assigned your USB key) and the data goes elsewhere (F:\Documents) so the example given in the above link isn’t good when it comes to backup. Typically when I backup my documents (and Portable Apps provides a backup application integrated into the software) I only backup the Documents folder, this saves time and makes the backups much smaller. A full backup is roughly 700MB now, which takes some time, and some hard disk space also.
So now I run document editing software, my IDE, IM, Firefox and Sunbird off my USB key making my desktop almost entirely on my USB key. The final showdown is Skype which I use regularly for making [free] calls to my family.
Just to mention, I’m now using 1.1GB overall of my 4GB, and that’s almost all the software installed that I require. Shame this doesn’t run off a Mac though.
