The Debian-Live approach also provides some good opportunities. First and foremost, the very easy remastering makes it efficient to run with no persistent store quite often. For instance, upon remastering, I just start without the store, and the image I run is union-mounted with the persistence file and copied&compressed. Then I have to boot something else to copy the new squashfs image in place, but that's all that has to be done outside the system.
Boot the new image without persistence, create a new persistence file.
For further adaptations, the new persistence file can be mounted in an instance run under kvm, programs can be added and settings tweaked for an eventual new remastering.
Storing the series of squashfs-compressed images, one can always go back in this process if needed.
Lenovo SATA Solid State Internal Hard Drive ST800, 128GB/256GB/512GB/1TB, NEW
$45.99
CISCO AIR-SD240GBKS4-EV 240GB 2.5 SATA 6G SSD WLC 5520 & 8540
$175.00
Lenovo Internal mSATA SSD Hard Disk ST600, 256GB/512GB/1TB, NEW
$42.99
SanDisk 1TB SSD Plus, Internal Solid State Drive - SDSSDA-1T00-G26
$74.99
Crucial BX500 240GB Internal SSD,Micron 3D NAND SATA CT240BX500SSD1 - OEM item
$16.99
Netac 1TB 2TB 512GB Internal SSD 2.5'' SATA III 6Gb/s Solid State Drive lot
$13.99
Western Digital WDS500G1B0A-00H9H0 500GB 2.5" SSD Grade A SKU 5036
$18.99
Patriot P210 128GB 256GB 512GB 1TB 2TB 2.5" SATA 3 6GB/s Internal SSD PC/MAC Lot
$14.99
Fanxiang SSD 512GB 1TB 2TB 4TB 2.5'' SSD SATA III Internal Solid State Drive lot
$198.99
Fanxiang 256GB 512GB 1TB 2TB 4TB Internal SSD 2.5" SATA III 6GB/s for PC/MAC Lot
$197.99