Nest your home and settings

The nesting function offered by dyne:bolic is a quite simple but revolutionary concept for the way operating systems usually worked until now. dyne:bolic was the first (but no more the only) GNU/Linux distribution really implementing it.

The concept is simple: you cannot modify the operating system, you use it as it comes and you update it all in once with new versions, it is a whole compressed file, which is only readable. The writable part, where you store your data and settings, is stored in a separated way, inside another file of variable size which you can store on a usb key or an harddisk. This is a nest. If the nest you stored is found by dyne:bolic while booting, then you use its space for your /home and settings, which are no more lost in volatile RAM at the next boot.

In this way when you upgrade your system you simply have to get a new dyne:bolic version, all your data is not affected by any re-installation process and is safely stored in your nest, while you don't risk to break your operating system with an upgrade (which is a common case with many other solutions around).

A nest is just one single file, the size you want, in a writable partition of your choice [1] . Making a nest doesn't requires any change in the data structure of the partitions: just one file is created in the root [2] , it will be called dynebol.nst and will keep all your home and settings inside (/home and /etc).

To get rid of a nest you can simply delete it from a system outside dyne:bolic. And if you are concerned about the privacy of the data you store inside it, then you can also make an encrypted nest [3] : to activate it you'll be asked by a passphrase at every boot.

In dyne:bolic it is very easy to create a nest just with a few clicks of the mouse, using the graphical installer included: you'll find it in the menu System -> Nesting.