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I have a lot of accounts (48) on one website. I must use all these accounts every day. But that website has no opportunity to turn off double authorization, and in fact I don't have all these phone numbers yet.

So I decided to send to my USB drive 48 portable version of Chrome, one portable Chrome for each account on that website. And it was a great idea.

I have used them every day without log inning and was satisfied. But one day I reinstalled my Windows. And when I plugged in my USB drive to use these accounts on that specific website again I was shocked every single account was signed out.

I thought all cookies and data from browser sessions of portable browsers store on my USB drive, but as I realized they all were on my computer, only the bodies of these portable Chromes were on my USB drive.

How to deal with that? How to store cookies and browser session data of portable browsers in the folder of that browser not the system?

Destroy666
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2 Answers2

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Chrome isn't really suitable for a portable browser. It only has unofficial versions and even the one you're using from portableapps is listing multiple issues with the version:

Passwords Not Saved Between PCs By Default: Google Chrome stores passwords in such a way that they are encrypted in a way tied to current PC. While the passwords are not kept or left behind on the PC itself, they won't be retrievable when you move to a new PC. We've added password portability as an advanced option, though, which you can enable by reading the help.html file.

Certificates Not Portable: Google Chrome has no certificate manager. It uses Windows' certificates manager. So, any certificates you install through the Google Chrome interface are stored on the current local machine and will not travel with you. Thus, you should not use any private certificates with Google Chrome except on your own PC.

Some Settings/Extensions Locked Per PC: Google Chrome locks specific settings to a given PC. Details are included in this post. This behavior is by design by the Chrome team. If you would like this changed, please file a bug with the Chrome team. A suggested workaround is to sign in to Google to restore all settings and extensions and to use an extension such as Session Buddy to maintain your session state as you move PCs. Note that PortableApps.com has not evaluated this extension.

Note that other portable browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition do not have any of the issues mentioned above. These issues are specific to Chrome due to Chrome's design and not something we can work around without fixes to the base app by the Chrome developers.

That includes a hint for Session Buddy extension to maintain sessions. And I'm sure you're using some older version which likely may have had even more issues with portability, e.g. with mentioned cookies.

I would recommend looking at browsers which have official portable versions instead, they're much more likely to be fully portable. For example Opera. It specifically states that:

No matter which computer you work on, you can always run the Opera browser from a USB drive. Your browsing history, bookmarks, installed extensions and other data will only be saved to your user profile on the USB. None of that info will be stored locally on the computer.

Destroy666
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Instead of using a "portableapps.com" version, you can use the normal Chrome version, copy the Chrome folder to your USB flash drive F:, and do many different shortcuts:

F:\PATH\TO\chrome.exe --user-data-dir=F:\PROFILES\PROFILE1

F:\PATH\TO\chrome.exe --user-data-dir=F:\PROFILES\PROFILE2


...


F:\PATH\TO\chrome.exe --user-data-dir=F:\PROFILES\PROFILE48
Basj
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