I've been searching for this for a couple of days. I have a Linux Mint 18 USB that makes a pretty sweet live USB, but it is not persistent. It even fits on an old 2 GB thumb drive. I would like to set up a live USB to install the Phoronix Testing Suite on, but I'm having a hard time finding any up to date infos on distributions with live USB setups. Most of everything I've been able to find is pretty darn old, but 2013 seems to be the newest info.

I know Tails has persistence if you set it up, but I'm not sure that is really suitable. I think Kali has a persistent live USB option and I might try that if no one has any better ideas.

I think Ubuntu has a tool to do this, but I don't have ubuntu installed anywhere (and LM's tool to make a USB doesn't offer any persistence options).

Any ideas guys?

Personally I prepared full install to usb (debian), this operation should be supported by most distros and your data is saved accross reboots.
I'm not sure why you would like persistance on usb, if fresh install to usb can do the same.

You have two choices usually.

One is to use a creator program. Major OS's usually have a program available to make a live usb with persistence. You almost have to do it that way with a 2G flash. The OS is compressed. See www.pendrivelinux.com for some ideas. Many of the distro's are fully supported in these creators. Some allow many distro's in one flash.
Some distros have a way to boot to a live usb/cd/dvd and use a linux program to make a usb. Many allow you to download a program to a live boot and run it to install to a different usb.

If you had a larger and fast usb then you could make a real install to a usb. You might be able to squeeze in some of the distro's at www.distrowatch.com. Almost all major newish kernel distro's see a usb just like it does a hard drive so they all can be installed properly to a usb drive.

Main problem with persistence for me is that you can't fully install all programs or use kernel/systems updates properly.
Main problem with full installs is size and speed sometimes.


If you want you can create a distro at SuseStudio and it has a way to copy what you built to a usb as full install.

My here is that I use Live USB for Mint on an old Netbook running an ATOM processor. The hard drive died and I took it out, I added 2G of RAM to make it a 4G system.

My "data" is on a USB stick, as also is my boot. The things I have to do are to install browser add-ons when I boot it up, and sometimes set the save location for the browser to be not the default so that when I save content or a page, it goes to my data USB stick.

I find the benefits of this, at least for me are that I persistently have to know the information necessary to get going. And sometimes have to adapt when things change over the years or I choose a different live distribution.

I feel it keeps me on my toes rather than an install which I use for a very long time until something finally changes enough to force me to adapt. Meanwhile this also makes sure my awareness of where my data resides, is fully on my mind, and also helps me to not save and re-save the same stuff which may be "fluff" for lack of a better term. Because if you have infinite space on a hard drive, you save, save, and save some more, even accumulating duplicates of junk data.

It is easy to do. I did this on a laptop I bought with no hard drive.

https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/i...g3875/#msg3875

Note: I used my Linux version of Unetbootin to make my persistent pen drive.

Other ways to skin a cat

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtop...it=persistence

Fatdog64 is sweet tho I like the Debian idea (that's installed on my internal (Sid) and my external drive (Jessie)) plus have https://www.slax.org/ setup on USB...

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I'd sugest you take a look at AntiX (or MX Linux), you can install to USB as well as HDD, & it has the option to set up a persistent pendrive.

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page