Safe Portable

The terminology of portable applications is not so large because it’s a relatively new phenomenon. I don’t want to add new words or phrases to it but I think “Safe” and “Unsafe” portables must be distinguished.

In my opinion “Safe Portables” are portable applications (or launchers) that keep the local installation on the host computer intact. So if someone runs the portable version and then closes it, the launcher should remove its traces and restore all settings in the registry and in the file system that has been modified. If you’ll follow this guide you’ll create safe portables. To tell you the truth, safe portables are very rare to find.

Unfortunately unsafe portables prevails the portable world at this time. They are working good, one can use them exactly the same way as they were safe ones. But if there’s any local installation of the software, these portables would modify or destroy them so they won’t work after you’ve run them. I think creating unsafe portables instead of safe ones is the biggest mistake the creator can make. If you share them with others, you’ll come across angry users who are complaining that your portables destroyed the locally installed softwares on their computer. You really should avoid this. I came across portables that were so unsafe that they turned my XP into a crap so I wasn’t even able to boot it up.

If you use an unsafe portable you should be aware that some unwanted files and/or directories (in Application Data, Documents and other directories) and/or some registry keys will be left on your computer. If you use many unsafe portables, your computer may become slower and slower. But this is the smallest problem. Unsafe portables may overwrite (or even delete) some important system files or registry keys, which may cause undesirable results, such as some installed programs won’t run, your system may become unstable, you’ll get strange error messages and so on, provided if your computer is able to boot up. I think it’s unnecessary to say that we should avoid all these things.

There are cases when you cannot create a safe portable but only unsafe version of the software. If you are about to share them, notify the users that it may destroy the local install of the same software.


I have to admit that my earlier portables weren’t safe. Although they did a clean-up after closing them, settings of the local installation (if any) weren’t restored.

To sum it up: take care to create safe portables. After all, you have to create them only once, so make it as perfect as you can.