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Make a bootable drive

Persistence for live Linux

Create a persistence file on a Ventoy drive so an Ubuntu-based live image keeps your changes across reboots, and pair it with an image, from your phone.

A live Linux image normally forgets everything when you shut it down. Ventoy can pair an image with a persistence file on the drive, so the files, settings and packages from a live session are still there next time. BootForge sets this up from your phone, and it’s free.

Open it from the drive card on Home: ⋮ → Persistence, on a drive prepared with Ventoy.

What the sheet shows

Every bootable image on the drive gets a row with its persistence state:

  • Off — the image boots without persistence. Use a persistence file pairs it with one.
  • On, using: followed by the file’s path. Change file points it at a different file, and Turn off drops the pairing.
  • Can’t tell — the drive’s settings couldn’t be read, or are in a shape BootForge won’t edit. BootForge leaves them alone rather than guess.

Pairing and unpairing only change Ventoy’s configuration file on the drive, ventoy.json. Turning persistence off never deletes the persistence file, and replacing a pairing leaves the old file on the drive too.

Creating a persistence file

Tap Create a persistence file at the bottom of the sheet. BootForge creates the casper-rw kind that Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros use: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS and the like. Other distro families use a different format that BootForge doesn’t create yet. You can still pair their images with a file made elsewhere, for example with Ventoy’s own tool on a computer.

Type the size you want in gigabytes, like 8 or 1.5 (a comma works as the decimal point too). The smallest is 0.5 GB, and there’s no fixed upper limit: the field says how much this drive can take, “Up to … on this drive.” The file has to sit in one unbroken stretch of the drive, so that ceiling is the biggest unbroken free space, which can be smaller than the total free space. If what you want doesn’t fit, freeing up space, or moving files off the drive and back on, can open a large enough gap.

Before 0.1.28, the size was a choice of 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 GB, and every file was fully erased as it was created.

Confirm, and BootForge reserves the space and writes an empty filesystem into it. By default it writes only the filesystem’s own structures, so the file is ready quickly. You can leave the app while it runs, and it shows in the notification shade. Keep the drive plugged in and still until it finishes.

Erasing old data in the file

The confirmation has one option, Erase old data in the file (slow), off by default.

  • Off: the rest of the file’s space keeps whatever the drive held there before, such as deleted files. The live system never shows it, but it can be read from a raw copy of the file.
  • On: every byte of the file is overwritten first. On a slow USB stick that is more than a minute per gigabyte, so a large file can take over an hour.

Two guarantees:

  • A new file never overwrites an existing one. It gets a name nothing on the drive already uses.
  • Cancelling, or a failure, creates nothing. The file only appears once it’s complete, and the drive is otherwise unchanged.

A new file isn’t used until you pair it: tap Use a persistence file on the image’s row and choose it.

At boot

When you boot a paired image, Ventoy offers to start it with its persistence file. Whether persistence then works depends on the distro and on the file. BootForge writes the pairing and creates the file, but it doesn’t look inside a file you pair.

Shut the live system down properly rather than pulling the drive, so the persistence file is left in a clean state.