I'm trying a simple test of persistent home in version 5.3.1: In home, I touched testfile, and in /usr/local/man, as su, again touched testfile. Next, from menu, created persistent image. Checked to see that image file exists. Then rebooted with knoppix home=scan. (I found in this forum the curious fact that one must hit enter at the right time, even though all the selections in the dialog box are OK; after doing so I got a message that the image was loaded.) Next I looked for my two test files, but I can find neither one.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer: after creating persistent image, you have to reboot before anything can be saved.

Or do I have the wrong conception of what this is supposed to do? Browsing back over old forum comments, it looks like what was once "persistent home" is now "persistent session", i.e. the whole overlaid filesystem.

Answer: yes, that seems to be the case. The testfile in /usr/local/man was saved.

Also, "save knoppix configuration" seems to have disappeared from the menu, which would make sense if the session save now includes saving the configuration.

Answer: yes, that seems to be so. Printer configuration was saved.

There is an exit menu related to persistent home that flashes up for about 3 seconds. Am I correct to guess is that this gives you the option to update the session save if you are quick enough and that otherwise the session save is frozen at the time that you made the manual selection?

Answer: if you just let screen this time out, the session will be saved automatically. I haven't tried to intervene here, but I suppose it allows one to avoid overwriting the old image file.

Are there logs where you can check when images were written and read?

Answer: I haven't found any, but if the new-user introduction does not come up at boot, you have probably succeeded in loading the saved image.