In the coming months, I will be traveling a lot. During this travel, I would like to take my work laptop as well as a personal system. It is too much to take two entire systems, so I decided to pack light and only take the work laptop and keep my personal files on an external SSD Hard Drive.
I created two partitions on the SSD Hard Drive. One with the personal data, and another one with a Linux Ubuntu operating system. With the operating system on the external drive, I will have a complete personal system without the need to take a second laptop with me. I can use the same set of hardware, but my personal data and applications will stay completely separate from the work laptop. On the work laptop, I will load the personal operating system directly from the external hard drive. The performance turns out to be really reasonable with USB 2.0 interface and an SSD drive.
On my PC at home, I need a way to synchronize my personal files on and off the external drive. My PC runs Windows 7, but the operating system on the drive is Linux. The data partition has a FAT32 format and I can synchronize files with Windows 7 using the freeware tool PureSync. This is better than a simple drag-and-drop, because changes can come two ways. I can modify the files in the original location on the Windows 7 PC, and I can also modify files on the external hard drive using the Linux system. PureSync makes it easy to update both sides and resolve any conflicts.
Additionally, I would also like to run the operating system on the external drive as a virtual machine in Windows 7. This makes it easier to set the system up the way I like it to be without needing to reboot to a different drive too frequently. I have been using SUN VirtualBox for a while now, but I have mostly been using it with virtual drives that represent themselves as a file in the host system. It turns out VirtualBox can also load a guest operating system directly from an external hard drive. Instructions on how to do so are located here. Don’t forget that VirtualBox and associated utilities need to run as Administrator in Windows 7 if you’re going to try this yourself too.
