Using a USB drive to store data

Attaching a USB drive to the subject system is minimally invasive. This will cause some new entries in a few temporary pseudo filesystems such as /proc and /sys and the creation of a new directory under /media on most versions of Linux. A few larger USB 3.0 backup drives should be in your toolkit for just such occasions. It might be best to copy your system binaries to this drive first should you end up going this route to avoid having to mount more than one external drive.

Once the USB drive has been attached you can use the techniques described earlier to operate with known-good system binaries and utilities. Log files and other data discussed in this chapter can be stored to the USB drive. Techniques described in later chapters can be used to store images on the USB drive. Even if you used the netcat utility (described next), having some USB backup drives on hand can make sharing images much easier. Naturally, whatever you do should be documented in your bound notebook.