I'll be real, this is part of why I didn't understand Ventoy. I keep a bunch of large, fast thumbdrives around blank and available. When I need/want to put an OS on there, I do it when I need it, and then I'm always installing the most current version of the install. It takes under 5 minutes, at best.

I used to try to keep various installs on thumbdrives... but it would be two years down the line by the time I needed to use it again and by that time it's literally pointless to be using two year old installation media.

[–] CoopaLoopa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 2 days ago

Part of the point behind Ventoy is that you don't need to prepare the USB to be bootable. You can just copy/paste the whole iso into Ventoy and it will be bootable. New release comes out? Just copy it onto your USB drive. Don't even need to remove the old version of you don't want to.

Makes things much easier in the tech world for having a single USB with 50+ bootable tools and installers on there like with MediCat (which uses Ventoy as a base).

Only thing I've had issues with booting from Ventoy is the ProxMox install iso. Everything else has worked first try.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ventoy wasn't a foolproof solution but it really did beat the hell out of using 6 different USB drives. Most USB "pen drives" don't make labeling easy and without labeling I'm just plugging them in one by one till I find the one I want.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I remember various different concepts of USB flash drives with integrated LCDs that would display a label and the remaining capacity. Then they vanished and the only thing left were the Lexar Echo drives. Until a few years ago, when they have been pulled from the markets. Probably, because they didn't work with the now default GPT and its many different partition types.

[–] KnightontheSun@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

IODD makes some. I had the older HDD version that stopped working after it got dropped, so now I use this one:

https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-SSD-drive-with-mini-USB-30-with-secure-256-bit-encryption

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The IODD is basically a small drive enclosure, not a "stupid" USB drive.

I was more thinking of devices like this, this or this. Which have the simplicity of a normal USB device (just plug it in and go) and come with an automatically updating label so you can find the correct dongle.

But yeah, nowadays, I'd probably prefer the IODD thing.

[–] NobodyElse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

I use this thing all the time. It will serve up ISOs and VMDK images also. It’s quite fast

[–] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

As someone with few USBs available, Ventoy takes me 2 minutes to flash, several minutes to copy a set of ISOs, and then any time I need it, it takes 0 minutes to have a working USB with some arbitrary ISO. Sure, it's not up to date, but I don't need it to be if I need to recover an install or use some random tool.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

When I was working in IT, this would have been a very useful tool for doing some on-site troubleshooting with various tools or for one-off reimaging machines that were missed during a big update or something. Instead, I had a bag of USB sticks with labels on them, which was annoying to use and to maintain.