Installing a Portable Version on a USB Drive

One of our favorite features is the ability to install and run a portable version of Intellect or Time & Chaos directly from a USB drive.

You can create a fully functional licensed version installed directly to and run from a USB drive. This allows you to attach the device to a guest computer to run the program without needing to install anything on the borrowed computer, to access data and do all your work, then remove the USB drive without leaving any apparent tracks on the guest system. For Intellect users, this even includes sending and receiving email messages!

The version of your data you work with on the USB drive can then be synchronized intellegently with your computer so that any changes and updates you make to your data in one place can be shared with both.

Installing a Portable Version on your USB drive is easy!

1. Click "Options" on the toolbar at the top, then click on "Install to card".
2. Select the appropriate drive letter for your USB drive from the drop down menu "select destination memory device." Please note the amount of space required to fit all your data. Your email will eat up space quickly, so make sure your drive has room to grow!
3. Select "Install" and watch a copy of Intellect install directly to your drive.

At the end of the installation process, you should have a few new folders on your flash drive. Your data has not been transferred yet, only the program and settings. You do get the following prompt, though, which takes you to the next step:

Getting your Data to and from the USB drive is easy too!

If you click "Yes" to the installation complete message, you will be taken to our "Folder Synchronization" screen.

Please note that if you have done this directly from the "Install to card" screen, it will automatically fill in the data folder we created on your external drive. The drive letter will depend on which letter your USB drive was assigned, but after the drive letter should be "My Documents\Chaos Data", which is similar to our default data location on your real PC.

1. Select which data files you would like to sync - Contacts, Tasks, Appointments, Projects. Intellect users can also choose to sync Mail.
2. Click "Sync" to transfer your data

Running the portable version

Many Windows computers have "autorun" disabled for security reasons to make sure that USB drives don't launch unwanted things automatically. To use the portable version, you may need to use the Windows Explorer or File Explorer to locate the drive, locate the My Programs folder, then Chaos Software, then Intellect or Chaos (depending on which program you installed), then finally the intellect.exe or chaos.exe file. Double-click on the .exe to launch the program.

Sync to check in or check out the data

With your data on your flash drive, you are ready to go when you leave your normal computer! Since you are working with two copies of your data now (the copy on the main computer and the copy on the USB drive), you can use the option on the File menu for Folder Synchronization, which will take you back to the screen you did the initial sync from. You can sync when you leave to make sure the data on the USB drive is up-to-date and you can sync when you get back to update the PC with the changes you made on the go.

Please note the data location, which has to match the data location on the USB drive where you have been storing the data (not the program itself!)

You can learn more about Folder Synchronization from our Chaos University, with this video: Folder Synchronization

Updating the portable program installation

From time to time, we do release updates to our software. When you've updated the main version on your computer, you can go to Options and Install to Card to update the portable version to match what you've installed on the PC.

This help article applies to Intellect 4 or newer and Time & Chaos 8 or newer