Custom-sized persistence storage for Tails on USB flash drive

Question

I've been trying out tails on a USB flash drive. By default, when I create the persistence storage, it fills up the entire remaining space of the flash drive. This basically makes the flash drive useless for any "typical" usage, i.e. a simple, cross-OS storage device, because the encrypted storage is a pain to mount in many OS.

What I was hoping to do is:

• install Tails on the flash drive in it's default FAT32 partition (the installer does this automatically)
• create a partition with the persistence storage that doesn't fill up the drive

I can't pre-create the partitions as far as I can tell because the Tails installer will wipe everything. I can't resize the persistence luks partition because gparted and other tools don't seem to support it (yet). I found some command line instructions to resize on the command line, but the process was very complex and frankly quite scary.

So, to the point: how can I create the persistence storage with a custom size, or are there clear instructions on how to resize that partition?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I guess I found a simple workaround.

The "trick" is that when you run configure persistent storage in tails to create the encrypted volume, it will fill up unallocated space on it's device. So if you first create a partition of your liking and leave as much as you like left for the luks volume, you can control it's size.

Steps

• Install Tails onto a USB flash drive as usual, i.e. using the tails-installer utility
• Using a partitioning tool (e.g. gparted, disks), create a FAT32 volume of desired size following the partition that was created for tails by the installer
• Boot into tails and run configure persistent storage tool as usual. It will fill the remaining unallocated space on your flash drive with the persistence storage.

Result

Here's how it looks on a test 4GB flash drive of mine. Highlighted are the FAT32 volume I wanted to have for typical flash drive use (named half), as well as the encrypted partition created by tails for persistence (named TailsData).

Now I can plug the drive into any old OS and use the "half" partition, or boot into Tails and use the encrypted persistence storage (as well as the unencrypted FAT32 partition).