I'm not real smart with Linux/Knoppix much but I'm learning.

I've been moving and backing up and restoring my persistant directory onto a 512MB memory chip (USB) for a month or so now. Just mostly playing about and seeing how things tie together. So far I haven't lost any day yet (that I know of).

I've been playing with the aes256 loopback setups for encrypting the drive and so forth. I'll give you some of the info that I've learned by doing this.

To upgrade your persistant directory isn't a good idea just by copying the entire drive and then running Knoppix 3.4. It doesn't get all the files that need to be upgraded and I guess there are a few files that are in different locations.

So here's what I have and what I did.

1st I was not logged onto my home directory. In other words, the system was not booted with a home=... command. It was started with the "knoppix 2" command.

I have two actual hard drives in a computer that were formatted with ext2 fs. Mostly interested in the second drive. So I put my data backup on it. So here is what I did...

mkdir /mnt/xx
mkdir /mnt/yy
losetup -e aes256 /dev/loop1 /dev/sda1
...(needed if you used encryption)
mount /dev/loop1 /mnt/yy
...(change loop1 to /dev/sda1 or whatever your drive is if you didn't use encryption)
mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/xx
...(this is a second partition on the second HD)
tar -cvvzf /mnt/xx/k33.tar.gz /mnt/yy
...(this backs up your home dir)

now you need to reboot without any command parameters
once in the KDE make a new persistant directory
it will format that chip/drive again and make all new directories

then reboot again with the knoppix home=/dev/sda1 (or whatever you use) to get back into your persist mode.
then open the Utilities>Ark program and open your saved file (k33.tar.gz) (after mounting that drive of course)

You will need to select ranges of files to copy back to your chip/drive like all your personal files and the .mozilla directory. they will be placed into a directory under your home directory like /mnt/yy/../../
you will then need to move these directories to their proper location with the file manager. You can erase the newly created .mozilla directory before you start. Once your old .mozilla and other directories are where they need to be, just reboot and operate as normal. You'll have to re-setup printers and color schemes and so forth but the mozilla email and newsgroups and bookmarks are the killers for me. Plus any document's that I created.

Just in case you didn't know... in conquerer you can see hidden files and folders by going to "view>show hidden files".