Booting into the persistence mode

Restart your PC, or plug the USB disk into any PC that you wish to use and boot it. Hit F12 or Del or whatever key that your system uses to open the BIOS menu (you can find the key for your specific computer online) and select the USB disk to boot from. After you boot, you should see something like 

Choose the “persistent live” option to proceed and you are good to go. 

In this article, we will see how you can make a Ubuntu persistence Disk using a free and open-source tool called mkusb on Linux.

Most Linux distributions offer a live boot feature, which allows you to boot the operating system directly from the bootable disk (pen drive or DVD) without installing it on your computer. This gives the option of trying out a distribution without installing it. People use this feature to boot into public computers to maintain their privacy, keep their data secure, and access applications that may not be allowed on public computers like the ones in a public library or a computer lab. However, there is one limitation to this live boot feature, i.e you cannot store your data permanently on the bootable disk, so if you live-boot again from the same pen drive, you will get a clean desktop without any previous session’s data or any changes that you made in the previous session. If you could somehow store your data and changes permanently on your bootable drive, that drive would essentially become your personal portable Operating system and you can actually do that by making a persistent live USB stick. This can be done by various tools.