Abstract: A user's computing environment is imaged and copied to a transportable storage medium and virtualization technologies are utilized to allow the booting of the transportable storage medium on a host computer system. A virtual computing environment manager may exploit virtual machines, micro-kernels, boot loaders, and embedded driver sets to allow the transportable storage medium to be bootable and executable regardless of the hardware platform to which the transportable storage medium is attached. The user's computing environment is instantiated on a virtual machine implemented on the host computer system rather than using, altering, or otherwise effecting the applications, settings, or data on the host computer system. Thus, users can easily transport their entire computing environment among various hardware platforms on any host computer system.

Abstract: A user's computing environment, including operating system, programs, settings, and user data, is stored on a secondary storage device. The computer's operating system is reconfigured such that user data access requests are routed to the user data on the secondary storage device. From a user's perspective, the location of his or her user data within the computing environment appears not to have changed. Backup and restoration of the computing environment is easily effectuated from the secondary storage device.