Porteus

Today /home/guest became empty again, but the situation is different, so I think this is relevant.

I've stopped using copy2ram and moved all of my own files /home/guest to a separate partition. (The only non-hidden files are Desktop and a symlink to a folder on that other partition on the pendrive.)

Only Firefox was open, I was typing. Hit Ctrl-B a few times out of Emacs habit to move the cursor back, Firefox crashed and ~ was empty. A terminal ls ~ gave '/bin/ls: reading directory .: Input/output error'. Same thing happened after a reboot when accidentally opening a lot of new tabs in Firefox: crash, empty ~.

So it seems this issue is unrelated to the size of /home/guest, or copying, or copy2ram. (AFAIK copy2ram does not copy /home/guest into RAM.)

Maybe my new pendrive is faulty? Or too fast? I wish I understood what happens.

My /home/guest was in itself larger than my RAM. I doubt that it was loaded into RAM during boot in copy2ram mode. How?

copy2ram does not copy your changes to RAM but if you use changes-ro or changes=EXIT: or don't use changes= cheatcode copied files by you in File Manager goes to RAM (inside temporary fs).

Maybe my new pendrive is faulty? Or too fast? I wish I understood what happens.

I have had similar problem with my sdcard - it was mounted and unmounted while copying many files, so I couldn't copy my files without errors - but it was only on my older laptop, on newer one everything was correct.

You should try fsck cheatcode and another pendrive.