I'm getting my feet wet with Porteus, because I want a live, small, fast Unix to boot from a US stick - esp. to use for emergencies when Windows damages my system again with an "update". I mainly want to use just Firefox and a Thunderbird-like email client. This is for a ~1 yr old laptop, 8GB and Ryzen 5.

I've been using a file container on a FAT32 boot-stick for persistence of FF and emails, etc; and also to go back and forth with Windows transferring FF password files and so forth. But that's crashed twice, so I am almost exclusively interested now in reliability. A Linux filesystem apparently means having no more file data-container to crash. So which Linux filesystem should I format the stick to? I've read discussions on their forum, which were very involved but there was no conclusion. A simple answer will do, it doesn't have to be perfect.

Thank you.

For flash drives and older SSD-s I use F2FS, if you choose to partition make sure they are aligned.

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The crash would have little to do with filesystem I'd think. Using a live with persistence has some unique issues. Not sure what all filesystems can be used.

The second part is using a usb flash drive. Not dependable at all.

If one bought a high end high speed usb flash drive or better still maybe a mechanical drive they could do a full install of some OS and keep it fully updated. Otherwise maybe use a dvd booted OS like Clear Linux if all you want to do is use Firefox.

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I do hope you have all your data on an external HDD, incase windoze decides to wipe your internal HDD.

I'd suggest using a puppy, any puppy (linux). They are generally small and can run loaded entirely into your ram. https://puppylinux.com/download.html

Windoze does not, usually, recognise the existance of linux partitions, so be careful how you format the usb..

I have transfered information from files created in the linux OS to a windoze OS by placing the data of a usb formatted to NTFS (file system). You might also find usb formatted to NTFS works for you.

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Common problems with 'some' windows updates are turning on hibernation without asking/informing the user and turning on Secure Boot. Linux systems will not mount a hibernated partition and some Linux systems will not boot with Secure Boot on. Not sure either is related to your problem but more details on exactly what you mean by 'crashed'. What exactly happened? The computer just froze and you couldn't do anything or some other problem.

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Don't expect reliability from system on USB.

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I use ext4 on all my systems, (pendrives, SDHC cards, HDDs, & SSDs).

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Thank you, what happens sporadically (~once per week) is that the container file apparently becomes unusable (corrupted?) and upon my next login the saved data and configurations are all gone. I also get the error msg that the container file is read only - which makes no sense since it had been written to several times previously.

I have Porteus set to save state only when I logoff/shutdown. Sometimes, but not always, the system might hang at shutdown. At other times, there is no indication that my container file is now gone bad, until I discover such at next login.

I got the idea somewhere that some filesystems might be self-repairing, which seems surprising but would seem to be very useful.

I've discovered by trying F2FS that I can't use F2FS with Porteus. It is not recognized.

That usually happens when there is corruption, the read only business. Your using a windows (FAT32) filesystem so I you can run dosfsck if you have another Linux or run whatever windows uses. I don't use Porteus although I have put it on a USB so can't give any detailed help. Did you use the method explained at the link below to create your 'save' file, official installation guide.

http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/37-...uide-v-10.html

As mentioned above, if you are going to use the flash drive to transfer between Porteus and some windows system, having a Linux filesystem on the usb will create a problem as a default windows system will not be able to read much less write to the filesystem. There is 3rd party software available although I don't know how reliable it is.

I use EasyOs on a Sandisk USB.
EasyOS has option
'Copy to RAM and disable all drives'.
So far so good, very stable.
When I want to save something, I switch on and mount an external drive.
The only thing I dislike is I loose my VPN protection (which I paid for, stuck for 3 years). I try to make the VPN work, but then the container doesn't.