Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on USB

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TheBlackMambaXD
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Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on USB

Post#1 by TheBlackMambaXD » 25 Mar 2016, 04:50

Hi, I am a new Porteus user (as well as brand spanking new to linux) and I am kinda figuring out the persistent save feature.Long story shortish, Windows XP on my old laptop died so I started looking for a somewhat light-weight Distro i could run 100% off a usb drive, partly so I could carry it everywhere. I decided to forgo the standard install to CD,etc. and installed directly to USB via YUMI multiboot. Works GREAT BTW. Anyway I started my Linux experience with Puppy. I liked it, but wanted to try something else. I heard about Porteus from a few places so I gave it a shot. Anyway I liked it better so i'm sticking with it. My only issue is I don't really understand the change save feature. On Puppy it seems relatively simple, and similar to Porteus's .dat file. So to get my point, background over, whats the best way to do a "persistent" Porteus USB. Right now I'm just using the .dat save because my USB is FAT32 formated. I tried to Format, Partition my USB so I could do a full install, but could never get it to boot, so I stick to the multiboot. But from what I hear Porteus is meant to be run from .ext drive, and saves accordingly, and the .dat save is just a work around for Windows. Being that, is the .dat a reliable way to save my "stuff"? Obviously I don't want to lose my stuff, but also I'd like to run it the best way possible. Anyway, Thanks for any help you guys can offer. :)

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#2 by Rava » 25 Mar 2016, 07:00

My approach is a different one, I run the system, booting-wise as "always fresh", but use a local mysettings.xzm module, named in a way that it gets loaded as last module. The good thing is, only that gets saved what I put in there. The downside is, whenever my system should crash (e.g. power outage) I would loose the most recent changes, but that hardly ever happens so I can live with that risk.
Also, I see it as improved security that not all changes are saved by default (all systems can be cracked...), and knowing only the stuff I copied into the mysettings.xzm is there the next time I boot, to me that's a good thing...
Cheers!
Yours Rava

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#3 by TheBlackMambaXD » 25 Mar 2016, 08:08

Huh that' s neat. Now the problem I had is I can't use the .xzm module save. To do that I need the drive i run Porteus off to be formatted in a Linux ext2 etc.. But to format my drive i have to do a full install to drive, because if I format my drive I loose multiboot, let alone when I try I get errors and can't boot. Are you saying if I partition a small section of my USB flash drive I can tell Porteus to make and then use a .xzm module for save? Like choosing the directory for the .dat I have on there now, installed in it's own little folder? Can my .xzm save be on a separate partition? Huh I should try thanks

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#4 by Ed_P » 25 Mar 2016, 16:12

Are you looking to run Porteus as part of a multiboot system? I have a couple of multiboot flash drives using grub4dos and grub2 and rEFInd the later from Porteus. All my flash drives are FAT32 so files can be accessible by almost any system. Most of my multiboots are booting ISOs including Porteus but I have one that has Porteus installed on it, it boots on EFI and BIOS systems. On all my Porteus systems I use the save.dat approach to save Porteus changes. For files I want to share with other systems I save them on the FAT32 drive. I also periodically backup my save.dat file as a xzm file on the FAT32 drive.

I think you will enjoy working with Porteus.
Ed

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#5 by TheBlackMambaXD » 25 Mar 2016, 21:20

Ok, I kinda understand the system better, from a few more hours googleing, and messing around in Porteus. I think I have have the system the way I like it, and i'll just keep using the .dat save. I just know how frustrating it can be to fire up the OS and everything is reset, and I wanted to make sure that probably wouldn't happen. Ok thanks guys. I think I have enough to go on from here.

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#6 by brokenman » 26 Mar 2016, 01:48

My advice is to find Neko's USB installer script and use it. It will format your USB device with two partitions. The second should be ext and this way you can save your changes natively. Using a .dat container is a workaround and NOT the optimal way to save changes. Over the years I have seen many corrupt .dat files.
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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#7 by Rava » 26 Mar 2016, 17:40

TheBlackMambaXD wrote:Huh that' s neat. Now the problem I had is I can't use the .xzm module save. To do that I need the drive i run Porteus off to be formatted in a Linux ext2 etc..
No, you don't, it is just a compressed module, like the ones when you boot via cdrom, or copy the xzm to your usb pendrive, or harddisk. The boot media can be vfat, ext[234] or even ntfs.
Cheers!
Yours Rava

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#8 by TheBlackMambaXD » 05 Apr 2016, 03:24

kinda late here but thanks, i've figured that out. LOL.

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#9 by TheBlackMambaXD » 05 Apr 2016, 03:25

Thanks for the continuing help guys.

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Re: Best form of save for saving changes "Personal Stuff" on

Post#10 by francois » 05 Apr 2016, 15:05

Personally, I would go for brokenman strategy. Save changes file system Linux type is better for Linux distributions. Would you work windows with a Linux file system?
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