App Highlight: Ventoy
A “live USB” is a term used by computer people to describe a USB flash drive that's been configured to contain a full operating system that can be run directly from the drive. This is neat because it lets any compatible computer run the operating system without first needing to install anything.
There are a lot of cool purpose-built operating systems that wouldn't really make sense for general usage, but work great from a live USB, such as:
- DBAN – A tool for securely erasing disks
- System Resuce – A toolkit for repairing or salvaging data from damaged or unbootable computers
- Clonezilla – A tool for imagining drives
- Tails – A security-hardened OS that doesn't store anything
However, carrying around a dozen flash drives is annoying, and the process of keeping all of them up-to-date quickly becomes cumbersome.
On an episode of the Linux Unplugged podcast, I learned about a neat tool called Ventoy.
Ventoy is really great. It sets up a USB thumb drive so it looks like a mass storage device when I insert it into my running computer. I can then drop .iso (or .img, .vhd, .efi and others) files into the drive.
After that's done, if I tell a computer to boot from that thumb drive, I am presented with a menu listing all of those disk images.
Half a dozen live USBs are combined into one, and updating any of .isos is as simple as copying a new file over.
The thumb drive is still usable as a basic data storage device for stashin or sharing files. It's been a great tool, check it out.