1

I have a stationary computer at home. I have stationary computers at school. Often times I do work on the computers in school, the only problem is: I don't have my files and downloading from dropbox every time is time consuming.

Can I have a USB Hard Drive that has the same content as my computer (I can keep the usb cable in it and maybe write from computer to hard drive every hour or so). But then I need to be able to take the drive to school, boot it up from a computer there, work on my files, and when I come back home I can write USB drive -> Computer.

So a regular day would be.

  • 7 am Computer -> USB
  • Go to school
  • 2 pm work on usb at school computer. Do some changes.
  • 6 pm come home, USB -> Computer
  • 7 pm work a little from the computer
  • 8 pm Computer -> USB
  • 9 pm work a little more. Computer -> USB.

I'm on windows 7.

I emphasize: I need to boot from this usb since I have software installed on my own computer that I want to work with.

Update 150928:

I'm now on Mac OSX. Can this be done? So the "Computer" in my text above would be a mac. (The school computer runs Windows.)

user1603548
  • 582

4 Answers4

1

You have a couple of options here, but none of them are very viable.

  • eSATA Drive: This is by far the easiest way but requires that both computers have eSATA ports on them. eSATA has all of the benefits of a removable hard drive with none of the drawbacks. You can install Windows to an eSATA drive just as you would a regular internal drive and just Option+Boot the computers to boot from it. Unfortunately, eSATA was never very popular and it has declined in use since USB3 hit the market, so finding computers that have them is tough.

  • Windows Embedded: Microosoft makes versions of Windows XP, 7, and 8 that are specifically designed to boot and run entirely from a USB stick or SD card. The downside? It's not available at retail. The only way to get it is to purchase a device that has it. Still, you can download a trial version from Microsoft and it will work for 180 days -- long enough for a school semester or two :-) You may also be able to obtain it from the Microsoft Academic Alliance if your school participates in that program.

  • Windows To Go: Windows 8 has the ability to boot and run from specific models of USB flash drive and it's totally supported by Microsoft. The downside? It's only available on the Enterprise versions of Windows 8 and 8.1 so the only legal way to obtain it is to have a volume license agreement with Microsoft. You might be able to swing this through the Academic Alliance as well.

  • There are also several hacks to make this work right as long as all the machines you intend to use it on are known to you. It's messy and involves a lot of registry-fu. It's also not supported by Microsoft at all. I've done it before but I would never consider this option for anything beyond a clever experiment.

The bottom line here is that Windows unfortunately was just not built to do what you want, which is a shame considering both OS X and every flavor of *nix can do this with ease.

Wes Sayeed
  • 14,102
0

If you fancy using Linux, most distributions can be installed and booted off removable storage including external drives and SD cards. You could set aside a small partition on the external drive that is used for the Liunux OS, and then keep the rest as a FAT/NTFS filesystem.

You will also need a tool on the Windows 7 machine that would synchronize the contents of the FAT/NTFS filesystem with a local directory. A tool like rsync is ideal, but not sure if one can be found for Windows. If you can't find it, another option is to run rsync from within the Linux OS on the external drive: boot it, sync the folders, and then boot Windows.

Unless the files you are working on are large, I would suggest using an SD card instead of an external hard drive. It may not boot on some PCs, however, so you should first check. SD cards are far more robust than hard drives and there are large SD cards on market now that aren't too expensive (32GB should suffice for most purposes unless you are doing video or photo work). Booting from SD cards is also somewhat faster.

0

I'd recommend running a virtual Windows version from your usb hard drive.

Steps to accomplish this:

  • Install Virtualbox on your home computer and create a virtual machine on your usb harddisk with all the software you need.
  • Create on your usb hd a separate partition with your files for easy copy-paste synchronisation.
  • Install Portable Virtualbox on your usb harddisk so you can run the virtual machine on your school pc.

The only "disadvantage" is that you can't directly boot this OS, but that you need to boot it once an other OS is booted.

(Answer typed in a hurry from my iphone; I'll edit it later with some more explanation and links)

agtoever
  • 6,402
-1

There are a few drives on the market that have backup software built into them. You will just need to install the software on each computer. You can, however, work on the file from your usb drive. Just navigate to your usb drive and open the file from there. Any changes that you make and save will be saved to the usb drive. There are some drawbacks to this method. If you lose the drive or it becomes corrupt, you will have a more difficult time recovering your files.

I personally do manual backups. At school I would copy only the files I needed to take home with me. If you want something automatic, look for a drive with backup software. USBFlashCopy is an interesting tool that will backup files from the usb drive to your computer. Kinda backwards, but may be what you are looking for.

EDIT: If you are not working with sensitive information and only need microsoft office related applications, you may benefit from Google Drive applications. The only issue is that you need an internet connection, otherwise it backs everything up automatically.

mac
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