Best free USB flash drive apps
The humble flash drive can be your saviour in times of need – Nik Rawlinson reveals the best free apps to keep in your back pocket
The humble flash drive can come to the rescue in an emergency – Nik Rawlinson reveals the best free apps to keep in your back pocket.
If you’ve ever had to troubleshoot a computer for friends or family, you’ll know the value of a USB flash drive filled with useful apps and system utilities. If you’re travelling or working across multiple different machines, it’s also a handy way to keep your preferred applications with you. Even if you’re just looking after your own devices, it’s a good idea to keep a set of recovery tools on a flash drive, just in case disaster strikes and you can’t get online.
In scenarios like this, “portable” apps are particularly handy – installations designed to run directly from external media, without needing to write files to your local hard disk or store anything in the Registry. But which specific apps should be loaded up on your USB drive? Over the coming pages we’ll highlight a selection of must-have tools you should download, install and store in your top drawer – and none of them costs a penny.
Before you start building your collection, though, we suggest you invest a few pounds in a new USB flash drive. Every time you write to a flash memory cell, it gets one interaction closer to failure, and since portable apps use the flash drive for all their temporary storage, they can rack up write operations very quickly. For the same reason, opt for a high-speed USB 3 device, or you may find you’re sitting around waiting for programs to load and run from media that’s orders of magnitude slower than a regular hard disk.
1 Portable web browser
Running your favourite browser from a USB flash drive means you can take all of your bookmarks, extensions and plugins with you, and enjoy the exact same experience on any machine. It also means you can safely log in to sites and use the browser’s sync service without the risk of leaving your credentials on someone else’s machine. And you don’t need to worry about leaving your browsing history or cached content behind – handy if, for example, you’re using an internet café while travelling.
There are a few portable browsers to choose from: one popular option is the portable version of Google Chrome ( chrome-portable.com). It’s fully featured, although it tends to lag a few versions behind the latest Windows build: at the time of writing, the portable build is on version 66, while the regular desktop edition is at version 68.
If you’re not a fan of Chrome, there’s also a portable build of the Opera browser ( opera.com/ computer/portable). Or, if you prefer the Mozilla way of doing things, check out the portable edition of the Pale Moon browser, which is forked from the Mozilla Firefox codebase ( palemoon.org/palemoonportable.shtml).
2 FTP client
When fixing a PC, an FTP client can come in very handy. The free FileZilla client comes with a regular Windows installer, but will run directly from a USB flash drive. Simply download the Zipped edition ( pcpro.link/289zilla), extract it to your USB flash drive and double-click on the icon to launch it.
While the client itself runs from removable media, it can access any drive in the system, so you can easily download whatever files you need – or back up data to a remote server.
3 Web server
Running a web server from a USB stick may not sound obviously useful, but it means you can carry a complete dev environment in your pocket. Say you’re designing WordPress themes: you can work on any machine and test your creations on a live version of WordPress without internet access.
It isn’t hard to set up either. The XAMPP package rolls together the Apache web server, MariaDB database, PHP, FileZilla FTP server, phpMyAdmin and a variety of other
utilities. The only catch is that locating the portable build requires a bit of digging: to find it, point your browser at the usual download page ( apachefriends.org/
download.html), click More Downloads in the Windows section, then click through to XAMPP Windows. Select the build you want to use – opt for the latest, unless you need an older version of PHP – then scroll down the list of installers until you find one with “portable” in its name.
If you prefer WAMP, check out UwAmp ( uwamp.com), a portable distribution that uses MySQL and SQLite rather than MariaDB.
4 Password manager
If you’re serious about security, you should use unique, randomly generated passwords to log into sites. These are hard to crack, but they’re also more or less impossible to remember – which becomes a problem when you need to use a PC that doesn’t have your password manager installed. KeePass Portable ( keepass.info) solves this problem: it runs directly from a flash drive, so you can access your passwords without ever having to store your credentials on someone else’s computer. Just make sure that your master password is absolutely unguessable – otherwise, anyone who gets their hands on your flash drive could gain the keys to every site and service you use.
5 Antivirus scanner
It’s always good practice to run a virus check from external media, as this makes it harder for any malware that may be present to interfere. Emsisoft’s Emergency Kit ( emsisoft.com/en/
software/eek) lives on a flash drive, but updates itself over the internet when you run it, so you get the benefit of the most up-to-date signatures.
You can choose between quick, standard or custom scans, depending on how thorough you want to be, and as well as malware, the software can also detect potentially unwanted programs. These aren’t harmful, but they can be annoying, waste space and interfere with the operation of your browser or other applications.
6 Software uninstaller
When Windows goes wrong, it’s not always easy to clear out the apps that may have caused the problem in the first place. Revo Uninstaller ( revouninstaller.com) is a portable third-party clean-up tool that promises to purge your system of stubborn, unwanted programs.
It’s simple to use: open up your flash drive and double-click on the app icon and you’ll see a list of installed applications, any of which you can remove with a couple of clicks. The basic portable edition is free, but a paid-for version adds the ability to clean up the leftovers of partially uninstalled apps, and to back up your system and Registry before making changes. “Hunter mode” meanwhile replaces the regular front end with a graphical target-based interface: drag the target onto any icon and you’ll get options to uninstall it, stop it auto starting, kill any associated processes, check its preferences or open its parent folder for further investigation.
7 File recovery tools
Have you ever accidentally deleted a critical file? This is where portable apps come into their own: because nothing is written onto the hard disk, portable file-recovery tools offer your best chance of restoring your data before it’s overwritten. Wise Data Recovery ( wisecleaner.
com) is one of the best free options out there. It scans both internal and attached drives, and as well as pulling up file names, sizes, path and access dated, it shows how likely it is that a given file can be recovered. You can order files by any criteria, search for specific entries across any folder, and restore files to a separate destination.
Another great free, portable option is Recuva ( pcpro.link/289recuva), from the team behind CCleaner. It works in a similar way, giving a diagnosis of how salvageable each file it finds is, from “excellent” to “unrecoverable”.