Professor Forester

I must admit I've not done MY homework as promised. Tax time arriveth, you know.
I am taking up our quest again now, however.

To recoup, here's what I think is the current state of affairs:
you have invented patches to give Knoppix 6.4.4 two new cheatcodes, backup
and restore. These two capabilities, in effect, automate the utilzation of the
capability already in 6.4.4 which manages a file update*.tar.gz in a manner to
allow the backing-up and restoration-of the knoppix-data.img file.
These newer offerings utilize squashfs to speed things up beyond the capabilities
of the initial offerings. Only the backup speed improved significantly, but this
may be due to limitations in writing to the USB. Please confirm or correct me here.

In an earlier exchange, you indicated these capabilites could not be realized as
menu items, but only as cheatcodes. I'd like to re-visit this in consideration
of how I might like to apply all this magic. I really would like backup to be a
menu choice to be used during normal on-line use of 6.4.4. Restore I would use
as a cheatcode in addition to my normal DEFAULT set of cheatcodes.

The meaning of backup here is to create a tar.gz of a snapshot of KNOPPIX-DATA,
using squashfs, since it offers an advantage; but do this as a menu choice,
or as a console command, but not as a cheatcode, per se. This I realize is a
complication of your approach to backup. And, I know you are hesitant on doing
the back-up on-line, but I'm not sure it's a show-stopper.

The meaning of restore might be simply to find such a snapshot and restore it
simply per the normal update* process of 6.4.4, since squash seems not to offer
any improvement; do this as a cheatcode to be appended to a normal default.
This might actually be a simplification of your approach to restore.

I need to review for myself if there is any complication in appending a cheatcode
to my normal DEFAULT set of cheatcodes; I don't recall.

I have in the back of my mind how nice Win7 allows system image snapshots, and how
handy these are when something goes funny.

The faster restore is a holy grail for another day. I don't know why the
KNOPPIX file can be unpacked so fast, but not the knoppix-data.img; doesn't make
sense, or it's just not fair, somehow.