A method and system for hibernating the state of executing applications on a removable module and resuming the applications at later time using the saved applications' state. After inserting the removable module into a computer system, the applications' state information stored on the removable module is loaded. The application state information may include an application identifier, a file identifier of a file being accessed by the application, and user preferences related to the application. One or more software applications are loaded from a nonvolatile storage device accessible by the computer system to a memory accessible by the computer system, and the loaded applications are executed. The state of each of the executed software applications is set based upon the corresponding application state information.