This article goes over the functionality of persistent user data on Tiny Core Linux. Other articles will explain how to get your installed applications to stick. This article will concern itself

The heart of the user data persistence feature is the filetool.sh utility, which reads the list of files to backup from /opt/.filetool.lst and stores the backed up files to the location specified in /opt/.backup_device. A file called mydata.tgz is created that contains the saved files.

A GUI called filetool can be used as well, and can be called from the control panel button “Backup/Restore”.

By default, filetool saves all files and folders in /home/tc to mydata.tgz.

We encounter a classic chicken-egg problem if we attempt to restore files using /opt/bootlocal.sh, since the backup tool itself is supposed to restore this file! Because of this, a kernel argument is used to ensure that the customized /opt/bootlocal.sh file is extracted before the startup process completes.

Using kernel argument restore=UUID=

While .filetool.lst is used to determine what files and directories to backup, .xfiletool.lst determines which files in the .filetool.lst to exclude. For example, if you wanted to backup all but one file in a directory, you would add the directory name to .filetool.lst and the file name to .xfiletool.lst. Path names in .filetool.lst and .xfiletool.lst must be specified relative to /.

• Browser bookmarks
• Wireless network settings
• Browser extensions
• X server settings (repeat rate, mouse speed)

• TCVD (TinyCore Virtual Disk boot code see faq for info)
• Direct home mount