Just picked up a 128GB USB A/C stick that can go on my keyring. What are some things I should put on it to have access to at all times?
I already have self hosted services accessible over my VPN, so this would be for when I can’t access that.
I’m thinking at least Ventoy and some common ISOs, then I’m not sure what else.
I had one:
- Live OS, Fedora KDE or something
- 5GB FAT32 for printers and windows, lol
- X GB encrypted EXT4, F2FS or BTRFS for storage
Eh…
Ventoy (on a comically small external hd – 8 GiB) and retrogaming/backup-related files on a 1 TB one.
Just sticking a USB stick into a bunch of different ports, is going to get you an STI eventually.
How do you make the stick read only? To prevent picking up malware along your journey?
STI
Serially Transmittable Infection?
No. Don’t be stupid. Serial Tract Infection. Duh.
This is where the physical write protect notch on SD cards would be useful.
Pretty boring. School textbooks and portableapps with a few of my essentials - Firefox, vim, GIMP, and some others I’m forgetting right now.
Yeah main thing is Ventoy and images for windows 10 and 11. I also have some basic tools, and some portable versions of some games I like (OoT, Warcraft 3, etc).
I’ve got a USB stick on my keys but I don’t remember what’s on it because I’ve never used it lmao.
I’ve got a 15 year old SD/USB combo card on my keychain. I plugged it into a TV around 6-7 years ago because there were a couple of kids movies on there.
I also know I have some Portable apps on there, but probably a little out of date
lol, I feel you there. I got a ruggedized, waterproof USB stick about 6 years ago to keep on my keychain and I’ve used it maybe three times ever. Though I’ve also been working from home for the last 4+ years so, y’know, less opportunities to use it in general.
Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, though.
Some useful files I might need someday (of course encrypted), bootable linux rescue distro and of course tailsos just in case.
512GB Ventoy, every version windows that can boot from ISO. Gandalf’s win 10 PE, gandalf’s 111 PE, Debian live ISO, max versions of Debian and NixOS, silver blue and fedora. Ubuntu along with LTS. I could have put my crypto partition on it, but I actually like keeping that as a separate key.
I had to google ventoy and now I feel like a cave man because I have a dish with 6 flash drives that all have different ISOs
My dish still has a flash drive marked “Win 8” which I’ve since overwritten with… Some flavor of Linux. Mint maybe.
I have an image of Guix, so that if I brick it accidentally, I will have a recovery ISO.
I’ve got 3 usb’s on my keychain. One for ventoi, one for tails and one for random storage.
If it’s anything like mine, this is a great idea that’s going to get smashed to fuck
A metal 128 GB USB on my keychain next to the U2F key
16 GB Ventoy partition with:
- Clonezilla (‘deploying’ my system image and backups)
- Mint Debian Edition (everything needed to test and recover my Debian systems)
- Debian netinstall
- Various manuals and reference documents
- Portable CrystalDiskInfo and VeraCrypt for Windows
- Dumping grounds for files that I intended to transfer between machines, particularly the XP retro gaming rig
- An optimistic IF-FOUND.TXT
- KeePass
- Previously Windows, until once upon a time, I booted into WinRE via Ventoy, got confused between X:, C:, and whatever else, and proceeded to nuke my USB instead of another disk. The Windows installer lived on its own USB happily ever after.
And a LUKS encrypted partition in the remaining space with more documents and a backup of almost all of my photos.
I got two identical 64gb sticks. One’s for a Ventoy setup with a bunch of different ISOs, in case anything has to be done and/or recovered. The other just has occasional random files i might need
I have three partitions: First one is Ventoy with a couple of distros per architecture. Partition two is a standard exfat partition for files. Partition three is a small fat16 partition, since there’s always that one device someone has (oscilloscope, 3D printer, UEFI/BIOS, etc.) that only supports very simple file systems. I’ve had to use the fat16 partition more than a couple of times and I don’t even work with legacy hardware.
How have I never thought of partitioning one large USB drive for multiple purposes…
Windows is not very pleasant about dealing with a removable drive with more than one partition.
I have a copy of MX Linux installed, as well as encrypted copies of all my most important data and a few commonly used portable utilities for windows and Linux. It’s mostly just an emergency backup, but I have used the other parts before, just very rarely.
