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One of the most popular commercial programs in this rubric is RoboForm, which has a no-install, USB-key-friendly version called RoboForm2Go. It's mainly used to fill in Web forms, including passwords, but packs in a bundle of other useful and allied features (like only filling in passwords on sites that have the proper domain name, to prevent phishing attacks). There's even a version of RoboForm2Go preinstalled on a USB key.

Another password manager that also works from a USB drive, KeePass, is both free and open-source, and sports one of the best feature sets of any program I've encountered in this space. (KeePass is one of the applications in the PortableApps.com suite.) Passwords can be organizationally grouped, automatically typed into form fields, and cleaned from the clipboard immediately after being pasted. The entire password database is AES-256 encrypted, and password data is kept encrypted in memory whenever possible to prevent snooping by other applications. There's even a plugin architecture; one of the available plugins for the 2.x version of the program lets you import passwords stored in Firefox.

One final suggestion involves something that isn't strictly speaking a program and is really only useful for Web sites, but is still worth discussing here. Chris Zarate's Genpass, now renamed SuperGenPass, creates a JavaScript "bookmarklet" — a piece of code that runs from a bookmark in your browser — which automatically supplies passwords for every Web site you visit by cryptographically deriving them from a single master password.

If you have a mobile copy of Firefox, you can install it there and use it as a password generator-to-go, or simply run it from a locally-saved copy of a Web page. For security's sake, you might want to set up Genpass so that you'll need to supply your master password each time it's used. Still, if you're reasonably confident no one else will be able to get to it (for instance, if you have the bookmarklet stored in an encrypted volume), you can hard-encode the password into it.

Synchronize Data Between Computers
If you're dealing with more than a few documents at a time, keeping the data on a USB drive synchronized across multiple machines is a bit of a hassle.

Windows has had a native feature to do this kind of synchronization since Windows 95: the Briefcase. When you copy files from your computer into a Briefcase folder on a USB drive, they can be automatically synchronized back with their originals if any changes are made to them on another computer. It's one of the simplest ways to do this sort of thing, and it's surprisingly under-utilized, although it's also pretty limited.

If you want more flexible ways to sync, you'll need to turn to third-party programs. One of the first apps I used to accomplish this was from Microsoft, interestingly enough: SyncToy . I used it to synchronize data not only to and from a USB drive, but to and from external removable drives as an impromptu backup application. Unfortunately, SyncToy needs to be installed on a specific PC (usually your main computer), and can't be run as a standalone application from the USB drive.

However, there's a plethora of programs for syncing data which can be run in a standalone fashion from a USB drive. I've grown fond of Allway Sync, which sports a staggering array of synchronization options — not just two-way, but n-way (between multiple systems and a USB drive) — and tracks all changes made to the files in a local database.

Another good one, with probably the most sophisticated (i.e., detailed) sync options of the bunch, is 2BrightSparks's SyncBack, which includes goodies like being able to sync files still in use, versioning, innate support for FTP directories, and 256-bit encryption. Allway Sync is free; while there is a limited free version of SyncBack, the full version of SyncBack costs $30.

	U3 And You
	No discussion of USB drives would be complete without at least some mention of Sandisk's U3 platform, an application specification for programs that are meant to run from a USB drive. Think of it as something akin to the PortableApps suite and its program launcher, along with guidelines for program behavior — e.g., any Registry changes or files made to the computer must be undone when the application is closed. U3 implementations of OpenOffice.org, Firefox, FileZilla, and a number of other programs are all available. Unfortunately, U3 is a proprietary standard, and has to be implemented on a USB drive that supports it by the manufacturer (at a 5% royalty per unit to Sandisk), although it technically doesn't cost anything to create an app for the U3 standard. Also, another successor standard co-developed by Microsoft and Sandisk is apparently in the works, so U3's days may already be numbered .

Encrypt Your Data
Open your favorite news site and odds are you'll see a headline about a government agency or corporation that's allowed a laptop or hard drive to go missing — with unencrypted data still on it. If you don't want the data you store on your USB drive to be seen by others, you'll want to encrypt it. This means more than simply making files invisible or even using NTFS's own encryption system; the former is no real deterrent and the latter isn't very flexible.

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