Schvenn.net

Nowadays, every respectable technician (and I use that term loosely) carries around at least one USB key with a suite of all their most valued applications pre-installed. This helps them not just troubleshoot, but function when away from their home/office with the greatest of ease. It's almost an extension of the CloudOS concept, since it's basically a PC that you take with you. Liberkey will also update the software automatically for you.

There are many backup solutions out there that work well as alternatives to the Window's built-in application, but what they offer isn't usually very impressive. The people at Macrium are now offering a pared-down version of their full-blown disk imaging software for free. The free version doesn't let you backup individual files or directories like other backup solutions and therein lies its weakness. However, it does let you create entire disk images in very short order and it compresses them to an impressive size. This is an excellent solution for creating entire disk images. From what I've seen so far, it takes no longer than the Windows software and yet it compresses images to half that size. That's what makes it so useful.

Since RemoveOnReboot stopped working with the release of Windows Vista, I've been looking for a suitable alternative program. Emco's product is that alternative. It features a fancy ribbon interface with the whole Microsoft Office type skin, which is pretty, but I don't really care how it looks. The point is, it does the job. It removes/moves/copies files on reboot, which comes in handy on many occasions. If you can't think of a time when it can, then don't bother downloading this program, but I've needed it to remove many "locked" files when I was cleaning house on my computer after testing or removing one application or another.

Paragon's free backup and recovery suite is one of the best available.

Having a USB stick with all your tools and software on it can be invaluable and there are many ways to go about doing so. However, this site takes a lot of the effort out of the process for you by compiling a large number of the best free software utilities and suites available into one portable library, accessible through a customizable interface. There's a few suites like this out there, but this is one of the best. I know I have one portable applications suite listed on this site already, but it's a toss up between which of the two I like the best.