For Tails users who have persistence enabled

So I experienced, first hand, a situation I saw recently posted here. I offered some suggestion but ultimately could not provide absolute answers. I now have the steps I took to recover my Persistence that magically vanished.


So I logged in to find that my Persistence folder was missing, so I checked

/live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked

To find my files still here, but not where they should be. I also noticed my "persistence.conf" configuration file was missing from this location. So I opened the persistence volume configutation tool found at Applications>Tails to see that no setting I had enabled was still enabled. So I re-enabled my persistent options and rebooted. This solved the delimma.
Luckily when you make a folder persistent it stays in /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked even after disabling the option because what happens is when you login with persistence unlocked it reads from the "persistence.conf" and places the folders where they are expected to be.
This is also a security issue for people who wish to completely remove files from their tails device. Simply disabling persistence for that specific folder or location will not remove it. You have to wipe it from its location, reboot, then remove it from persistence for it to be completely gone. Otherwise /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked will just keep a copy and just not put it in the expected location. For extra precaution you can check the tails data unlocked folder to be sure its gone. Hope this solves any future persistence issues.


Comments


[1 Points] alwaysthrowaways:

Same with me. Thought I lost everything when it seemed to magically turn into a blank tails usb. Then set up persistence again and suddenly it all came back next time I booted up. Weird and gave me the biggest heart attack ever.