How to Add a Persistent Partition to Debian 9.8 Live, Part 1
Last Friday, I decided to build a bootable Debian flash drive (a.k.a. thumb drive, USB stick, etc.), with the intention of using it occassionally to run Debian. Given that I was unambitious, I opted not to use a hard drive. At first, I wanted to do a full install on the flash drive, but found that, in addition to this not being recommended by most experts, would involve acknowledging to the installer that I had a bootable Windows hard drive on my computer. In theory, the Debian installer would ignore it, but I was concerned that it might malfunction and destroy my Windows installation. You might ask why I didn't just boot the install disk in VirtualBox, but what I found is that VirtualBox is not as compatible with flash drives as advertised, so this would also be impractical.
Therefore, I opted to build a "live" flash drive, which is something the developers at the Debian Project do recommend. What I found, though, is that the current version of Debian 9.8 Live does not support the saving of files. I had already known that this was the case with Tails in order to maximize privacy and security, but I had always assumed that Debian Live was different. I immediately looked up how to get around this problem, and found out that Debian Live requires a "persistent" partition and/or drive to save data, which is the same system one can use to save in Tails. I presumed that adding such a partition would be easy, due to the popularity of Debian, and the large number of tutorials online. I was surprised to find that I was wrong, and by Saturday I had given up.
The following Friday, I tried again and succeeded by Saturday (yesterday). Given the difficulties that I faced, and the widespread demand for a tutorial on this subject, I decided to make one for Windows users. Debian-only users may be able to find a tutorial for version 9.8 online, but I can't vouch for any one tutorial's accuracy. My own experiences are quite bad, as must tutorials that I found were outdated or simply wrong.
Here are just a few disclaimers, though:
1. My tutorial is in no way supported by the Debian Project, and I have no contact with them at this time.
2. The Linux file system driver that I used for Windows, called Ext2Fsd, was still in Beta at the time that I used it, and I had a number of technical problems as a result. These were the two specific problems that I observed:
1. After the use of Linux drives, my computer refused to shut down, and had to be forced.
2. Following the reboot, I found that some applications, including Open Broadcaster, had had their preferences deleted.
3. Also following the reboot, I found that the videos I had taken with Open Broadcaster were corrupted, with some of them being unplayable.
In summary: Be careful with Ext2Fsd, as it appears to still have a lot of bugs. Hopefully it will be improved in the future. In the meantime, I would recommend uninstalling it when you're not using it. For that matter: "Use at your own risk."
3. This tutorial specifically concerns Debian 9.8. This is the whole point, as tutorials already exist for how to build persistent partitions in earlier versions.
In this first part of the tutorial and the next, I will explain the reasons that you would want a peristent partition on a Debian Live thumb drive. I the third part, I will go over what you will need, and in the fourth through sixth parts, I will show how to add a persistent partition and test it.