USB Fedora 13 file disappearances

[muckybucket]

Hope I am posting in the right place!

I created a pendrive USB Fedora OS, worked fine. Installed a few bits and pieces, but when I used it again most of the files have disappeared (corrupt, deleted?).

This happened before, just after I put a load of updates on. I am certain it cannot be rescued, but how can I prevent this (apart from backing up)?

Has anyone else experienced this?

[bonedome]

Yep
I was most pissed off, I lost a whole load of movies, music and tv programmes, I tried a few data recovery type pieces of software with windows and linux but the non fedora part, to all intents and purposes did not exist, my 4Gb mem stick was 695Mb and was 100% full, I installed fedora 12 on my laptop from the usb and had to reformat it, the only thing I could find that could "see" all 4Gb to format was a windows app called hp (hewlett packard) format tool http://hp-usb-disk-storage-format-tool.software.informer.com/2.1/Thanks for trying though, I was going to give it another try (as it's recently been updated), not any more, cd or unetbootin for me

[kurtdriver]

I'm not sure how you installed to the USB key, but booting the liveCD and choosing "Install to Drive" and then be absolutely certain to choose the USB key, NOT your hard drive, has always worked well for me.

[Donald Winslow]

If you use USBCreator or its backend, the default is to create an installation that cannot be modified. You can choose "persistence", in which you specify how much space to load other programs, files, etc. Unfortunately, the last time I tried this (with Fedora 13), the installation did not keep my changes when I rebooted.

[kurtdriver]

The persistent storage option has a limit of, I believe, 2Gb. The method I outlined above has no limit and lets you save all changes. Anaconda just treats the USB key as another drive. Kurt