Ventoy

[davidy]

Been using clonezilla to restore and backup my pc using a 32gb usb3 flash drive. Ventoy allows me to have clonezilla and many other iso's ready to boot to from the same drive. Noticed someone mention it recently and thought I'd give it another go.
1-Grab the ventoy.iso file https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/v1.0.99
2-Use the mx-live-usb-maker to install that iso onto your fastest flash drive preferably at least 16gb in size.
3-Boot to that drive and click the install button
4-In the option tab, uncheck the 'secure boot' option and then click update (or it will not be writable when you reboot)
5-Shutdown and remove the flash
6-Boot, mount the flash drive, and then simply copy any iso's into the mounted drive's root folder.
Now when you boot to it you will get all the iso's as boot choices.
My fastest flash not only has a red blinky light but is double the speed, and size, of the one I was using for clonezilla by itself.

I have 15 iso's atm on a 64gb usb3 drive:
Clonezilla, Clover, Dban, Gparted, MacriumReflect, MiniTool, MX23.5, Pop-os, Refind, Rescatux, ShredOS, Snapshot, SpinRite, Ventoy, and WinX-Lite.
Ventoy uses exfat so you can put your snapshot's on it if you want.

[siamhie]

I've been using Ventoy for several years now. I took a gen 3 nvme drive I had laying around when I upgraded to a gen 4
and bought an nvme enclosure and flashed Ventoy on it with a separate data partition to put my backed up files on it so that
I wouldn't have to mount my backup drives right away after an new installation.

[DukeComposed]

1-Grab the ventoy.iso file https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/v1.0.99
2-Use the mx-live-usb-maker to install that iso onto your fastest flash drive preferably at least 16GB in size.

A friend and coworker mentioned Ventoy to me sometime around 2019 or so, before Ventoy had builtin support for creating a persistent partition on the USB drive. I ended up patching Ventoy2Disk.sh to provide this feature, and they eventually added this functionality to the official project a short time later.

I think it's important to mention that Ventoy provides a VentoyWeb.sh script, which allows you to create and upgrade USB drives interactively through a web browser, which I find a much easier experience than writing an ISO and hoping for the best.

In fact, writing an ISO and hoping for the best is so unpleasant it's a big reason why I enjoy Ventoy so much. It's much better at managing and booting multiple ISOs than YUMI is.

[imschmeg]

I use Ventoy as well for things like system rescue and clonezilla. However, recently I read that the maintainer has been acting strangely, and some people have become suspicious that newer releases might be compromised. One of those posts also mentioned an alternative called glim (on github), but I don't think it is being actively maintained.

I will try to figure out where I read this. Maybe r/linux on reddit? It was something like that...

Update:
Found the reddit thread that suspects ventoy and mentions glim:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... zma_scare/

I think I heard about the ventoy maintainer acting strangely elsewhere, prior to reading the above reddit thread. I have no idea where that was.

[siamhie]

Update:
Found the reddit thread that suspects ventoy and mentions glim:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... zma_scare/

Seems glim hasn't been updated in two years. https://github.com/thias/glim

[Adrian]

Ventoy is great, even more I use it to boot an installed MX on a .vhd or .vdi file:
https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html (I think this is a bit old instructions, might not need to run that vtoyboot.sh script)

This way you can actually boot to a regular-looking MX installation from Ventoy.

[CharlesV]

I started using Ventoy approx a year ago and it IS pretty amazing. I keep 4 production iso's on my big usb and then my main two machines snapshots. The coolest thing (imo ) is that I can just copy that iso out like Duke mentioned - no 'writing an iso' .

Put Ventoy on an extremely fast USB stick (or external nvme case) and you have a rocket ship boot!

AND... you can boot from your snapshot, have a "data' partition in ventoy and have an entire machine ALL based on your ventoy disk! Very slick!

[Akira]

So is Ventoy safe to use then?

[j2mcgreg]

So is Ventoy safe to use then?

As long as you are using the latest version. It was discovered during the release candidate phase of MX 23's development that the earlier versions of Ventoy were incompatible,

[CharlesV]

My understanding is that there is a security concern since Ventoy uses binary code (blobs ), so not ALL of Ventoy is available for checking as open source code.

Now, this HAS BEEN something that was / is known for YEARS and many people have called it out. However, there has been no known actual issue to my knowledge.

The dev's may have more insight to this, but the bottom line for me is - if your worried about it then:
1) it can be used for live sessions, but
2) Do not use it for installs / recoveries.