Recommended size for personal data

[Denver Dave]

I booted my lap top from the Knoppix CD and finally found the "Install Knoppix to Flash Disk" under preferences.

I was prepared to go have lunch, run a few errands and come back and wait for the installation to finish, but to my surprise, it only took a couple of minutes and the Flash disk does boot - great!

However, I get a message to the effect that no space has been created for personal data, 200 MB minimum 14,000 MB or so free on my 16 GB Flash drive. I'm not quite sure what personal data means in relation to operating system, applications and actual data used by the applications.

Anyway, what would a recommended amount of space be to allocate for personal data?

Thanks

[utu]

@ DenverDave

Greetings, Dave

It looks like you've made for yourself a LiveUSB from a Knoppix LiveCD,
and have not yet established a 'persistence' file.

If that is the case, you will want to do so to save your personal settings and
any new programs you will add. You won't need anything like 14000 Mb.
I would suggest you use only a few thousand Mb. For one thing, the more Mb,
the longer the wait for the preparation of the persistence file.
In this case the answer I suggest is, say 1000 or 2000; leave off the Mb in your response.

For reference, I use a 2000 Mb LiveUSB and allow 850 Mb for persistence.
This leaves me about 350 Mb for other purposes. This has always been adequate
for me. I use the 350 Mb to save compacted copies of the persistence file as 'backups'
in case persistence gets corrupted.

Let us know how this goes.

[Denver Dave]

If the Flash drive is 16000 (16 GB), with let's say 2000 used for Knoppix and 3000 for personal data, what is using the remaining 11000 and is it of any immediate use (I guess this would be the other purposes, you mentioned)? If I use up the 3000 can part of the 11000 be easily allocated later? Thanks - it did take longer to prepare the space for the personal data than I expected, but not too bad. Maybe I can save a few $ buy buying smaller Flash drives. Thanks for the help

[utu]

Greetings again, Dave.

My niche is working with smaller LiveUSBs, and I can do a lot with 2 Gb.

With 16 Gb you might be able to tackle re-mastering or LiveDVD aspects,
which can't be done with 2 or even 4 Gb as far as I know.

If you want to try some of the other versions of Linux Live USB's,
that is other than Knoppix, you'd best have at least 4 Gb, just to be sure
it'll all fit. 4 Gb SanDisks are about $10 around here, now.

[Denver Dave]

Thanks for the tips. I'm used to Windows where 100 GB is not excessive.

I've been playing around with ubuntu for the last couple of months and impressive (for ubuntu) that I've been able to get Firefox, Thunderbird (with addons), Openshot, Keepnote, Rednotebook, SpiderOak backup running.. I'm not sure that I'm correct, but I thought that I was going to need more than the 8 GB, so I went to 16 GB. Watching the sales, I've been picking up 16 GB Sandisk Cruzer drives for $20at Office Depot and Staples and the last one for $14 at Staples.

I have been thinking about a separate USB drive for data to make it easier to do backups.

Ubuntu 11.04 worked on both my Windows 7 laptop and my XP Desktop. Unfortunately, ubuntu 11.10 does not run on my desktop and I'm not sure I'm going to solve this in the near future. Mint 12 also does not run on the desktop.

So I thought I'd look into Knoppix again - 6.7 CD and created USB boot runs fine on both my XP and Windows 7 PCs as well as a very old pre-windows XP PC. My thinking, is I really mostly care about running the applications that I care about.

May adjust from what I run into with Knoppix

On ubuntu and windows, I've been using

Firefox 8 with addons
Thunderbird 8 with addons
Openshot 1.4 video editor
Keepnote (and also trying Rednotebook)
Testing SpiderOak backup

I'm thinking the above software is probably commonly used with Knoppix even though I still waiting to make progress launching on my PC.

[klaus2008]

If the Flash drive is 16000 (16 GB), with let's say 2000 used for Knoppix and 3000 for personal data, what is using the remaining 11000 and is it of any immediate use (I guess this would be the other purposes, you mentioned)? If I use up the 3000 can part of the 11000 be easily allocated later?

The maximum file size is 4 GB if your USB stick uses FAT32, but you can add additional persistent images to your Knoppix. See this thread: Adding more persistent disk images
There is also a thread about resizing knoppix-data.img.