All of / on my main machine will go easily onto even a modest thumb drive -- "df -h /" says only 11 GB; meseems I've heard of other people keeping back-ups on thumb drives.
But what about the OS? If I were to put, say, the current release of Fedora onto the same stick, would I be able to use that, while visiting in-laws for instance, as if it were a live CD =with= all my data?
1 - Would be the same as if you migrated the whole of / to a new build. Pros/Cons come with it, esp the Cons as it can get buggy but works for the most part. 2 - You would be making a live thumb drive because installing as a system it would be looking for the hardware of that system at boot. 3 - My work around in the past has been to split into 2 partitions on the thumbdrive, install live "cd" or release on the first partition. Put all the data on the second partition which I mount after the live OS boots on whatever system. This allows for the live OS to be updated w/o affecting data in the second partition. Best is you can "Z" the drive if you don't need it after the trip so your data isn't sitting around. You can also restrict movement to just your /home directory and save significant space.
As anything else there are pros and cons to this work around; but, there are ways of accomplishing what you want and relatively easily. Good luck.
my 2 bits, HIH Fred
On 03/21/2018 07:08 AM, Beartooth wrote:
But what about the OS? If I were to put, say, the currentrelease of Fedora onto the same stick, would I be able to use that, while visiting in-laws for instance, as if it were a live CD =with= all my data?
You can certainly install Fedora to a USB drive. Make sure you have a separate /home partition, same as on a hard drive. It works better if you have a USB 3 drive and a USB 3 port to plug it in, otherwise it can be somewhat slow. It's better than a live image because you can do upgrades including the kernel and you don't have to worry about filling up the overlay. There is a higher potential for filesystem corruption. If you're going to be using it on different computers, make sure the rescue boot image is updated or disable the hostonly option for dracut. Otherwise, you might be missing necessary modules needed to boot on their hardware. It's probably less likely when booting from USB, but it did happen to me when moving a hard drive to a different computer.
On 03/21/2018 07:08 AM, Beartooth wrote:
All of / on my main machine will go easily onto even a modest thumb drive -- "df -h /" says only 11 GB; meseems I've heard of other people keeping back-ups on thumb drives.
But what about the OS? If I were to put, say, the currentrelease of Fedora onto the same stick, would I be able to use that, while visiting in-laws for instance, as if it were a live CD =with= all my data?
I do it all the time. I use a thumb drives and 240 GB flash drives installed in USB3.1 carriers.
You boot off whatever GUI and OS you want from a Live USB, then install to disk. Select the flash drive or usb drive.
WARNINGS:
1) DO NOT REMOVE THE DRIVE UNTIL THE SYSTEM POWERS OFF !!!
2) DO NOT PLUG INTO A RUNNING WINDOWS SYSTEM !!!
Don't ask. Learned the hard way. Been there; done that; don't want to do it again.
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Beartooth -
fred roller -
Samuel Sieb -
ToddAndMargo