Caveats to using Balena Etcher

[Jason]

Our members have found that Etcher is the best program for making bootable flash drives (USB) from ISO files. It seems to work with almost everything.

But there is one case where you don't want to use it. And that's if you're using an ISO that is intended to have persistent storage. I discovered this important info in their online documentation and their suggestion of another program to use instead:

How can I configure persistent storage?

Some programs, usually oriented at making GNU/Linux live USB drives, include an option to set persistent storage. This is currently not supported by Etcher, so if you require this functionality, we advise to fallback to UNetbootin.

Note that their online documentation covers some other special situations and it's quite brief so it's worth looking at. You can find it here:

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/blob/master/docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md




Attached image: Etcher startup page

[fox]

Very interesting; thanks for posting this, Jason. I use Etcher all the time and have never run into this problem because I don't enable persistent storage. But I could see why I would want to do this; e.g. to retain certain settings for a future retest of a distro.

[Jason]

Very interesting; thanks for posting this, Jason. I use Etcher all the time and have never run into this problem because I don't enable persistent storage. But I could see why I would want to do this; e.g. to retain certain settings for a future retest of a distro.

I don't think I ever have either so I wouldn't have noticed. I think only certain distros have this capability. It can sometimes be handy like using it across different machines if you need to transfer data or keep your preferred settings like in your browser. I don't recall what distros can use it other than Puppy Linux.

[fox]

The only way I have ever used Etcher is to copy a distro I wanted to try onto a USB key. When I try distros, I'm mostly interested in their appearance and also whether they "see" components of my 2019 Mac that Ubuntu, Manjaro and Mint don't see. On that account, I'm batting 100% - no distro I have tested picks up my internal wifi, sound or microphone. (Lucky me.) At any rate, I don't really need the persistent storage because I don't run any distros from a USB key after I check them out.