I’m just wondering if it will be possible to load scrivener on a USB and run it on any machine I plug it into, so I can work on the move. It is a small thing if it is not, but I believe all it take to make an application portable is that it contains all of it’s own dependencies and it doesn’t write any files to the system or registry. Thank you.
This is a feature I would like.
I use a USB stick and would like to use a portable hard drive like a Western Digital Passport.
Having Scrivener and all the files on one drive would be great.
Right now when I use these items it isn’t long before Scrivener and I lose track of what is the most recent. I do not use Dropbox. Even a synching program gets muddled.
The option of Scrivener and the files be self-contained on a portable drive would be great for me.
Could it be a feature that can be turned on or off so those who want it can do it and those who don’t don’t have to?
Could not the auto save be user adjustable to save to the portable drive? If not, manual saving works for me.
We don’t officially support it, but you can copy your Scrivener directory to a USB drive to run it on other computers. There are limitations–your settings are saved in your local user file, so they won’t move with you (though you can save them out separately to move them to another computer, the same way you might if you installed to multiple machines), you’ll have to re-enter your registration information for new machines, and the dictionary probably won’t run unless you already have Aspell installed on the machine for some other reason. Performance is likely to not be as good as well, just since you’ll be running from an external drive.
Keep in mind that you can install Scrivener to your local directory, so even if you don’t have full admin privileges on the machine you can still run Scrivener. Your projects are all saved outside of the Scrivener folder in any case, and you could work on them from a portable drive even with the program installed locally, although as noted you’ll probably want to bump up the auto-save time so that you don’t get as much slowdown. You might also try using the Backup Project To feature just before closing the project to save a date-stamped zip copy to the portable drive that you can then move to your desktop on the next machine and unpack and work from. It still requires remembering to do that at the end (I’d delete the local copy once you’ve confirmed the backup worked to reduce confusion), but it’s nice having the date and time as part of the filename and for me the fact that you have to extract the files helps make sure I really pay attention to what I’m doing. 
You could of course do the backup without zipping the file.
After posting this, I ran across a nice little, free application called Cameyo which does application virtualization. I would like to try this on Scrivener to see if it is possible to make it portable, but I wanted to be sure it didn’t violate any terms and services. It seems to me, beta versions are the perfect opportunity to try something like this, as they do not require a license to run. However, I would have to rebuild it once the release is available (an event I’m chomping at the bit for, by the way). I might not be first in line, but I’m definitely going to be purchasing Scrivener right out of the gate. 
I don’t know if the windows version’s licensing software works the same as it does on the Mac, but it has been tried on the original platform. Here’s the original discussion, which may become relevant if it isn’t currently for the beta:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7575&hilit=external+hard+drive+boot&start=0