sorry if this is a repeat just curious about SD Chips i keep reading that you can't boot from them and they are not suitable for emergency recovery use. i would like to be able to keep the most up to date recovery media and such on one like wimpe and drivers and all the stuff needed without a usb.
is this a planned limitation of hardware or OS
an SD would be so handy just tape to the back of laptop and be ready?
That varies from device to device (BOOTing from it that is). As for the rest, you can backup anything you want to it. To check you can just look at BIOS and it's fast boot selector and if it mentions SD card in it's menu (should be plugged in but no need to have OS on it). On my Toshiba (pretty old one), SD card port works over internal USB controller so inserting SD card is same as inserting normal USB storage device.
I keep few SD cards of varying sizes, some with Macrium Reflect rescue files and some with live Linux distros. With an USB to SD adapter I can use them on any computer.
On the other hand, there are very small USB sticks, barely larger than USB plug and you should be able to stick it in the laptop somewhere, like next to HDD for instance. Amazon.com: Kingston Digital 8GB DataTraveler Micro USB 2.0 (DTMCK/8 GB): Computers & Accessories
Many Thanks Count Mike, i was just trying to make sure that there would not be any issues with booting from the chip, i also have a toshiba only a year and a half old, I'll have to dig around in the Bios to see if it would boot via SD,
one other item is there a limit on the size of the SD 8,16,32 64?
They get expensive at those sizes. I use anywhere between 4 and 8GB and that's quite enough for all those emergency utilities. Actually I use 8GB for live Linux Mint + 4GB persistence so any installed program can stay installed unlike when there's no persistence and any installed program gets lost after shutdown. Macrium Reflect is quite happy with 4GB and even less needed for live partitioning program, live AV programs and programs for safety deleting disk content i staff like that.
It's much cheaper to have few of them than a large one. Could even use micro SDs and one SD to micro SD adapter.
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