Hi
If you're not actually booting off a Live Persistent USB, is it still possible to back up your data?

By data, I mean any text or script files saved to your Home folder.

Where is this located on the USB?

i think fedora live stores the virtual file system in /where-ever-usb-partition-is-mounted/live/squash.fs

i think you can loop mount it with kpartx or something and extract files from it.

I do this all the time, however in a more logical manner. My system has additional USB interfaces, plus also an SD card interface. I store data to a non-boot drive. Why not just do that? In fact, I like to separate my boot drive always from my data drive. Hence when I change my system, it doesn't impact my data.

You could do a full install on a usb and then it would be no problem. If you want to use a live system on a usb "without" persistence, you could do that but it involves more steps. You would first boot into a Linux system and shrink the partition on which the Live system is, then create another partition on the remaining space of the usb. Then when booting the 'live' usb, you would need to create a directory for a mount point, manually mount the partition and copy whatever data you want to it. You won't be able to save it in the /home directory. Everytime you reboot, you would need to go through the process of creating a mount point and mounting the partition. A lot simpler to use persistence.