Hi,
Trying again with a newer (only slightly) laptop and the latest release and it’s workin’g great so far.
What is the ‘best’ back up method for saving the USB stick?
How many people actually install it?
Hi, I’d suggest an encrypted clone of the drive. There are a couple backup solutions, hardware and software wise. Pretty much depends on what you have and what you want.
Persanally, I installed NomadBSD on a ‘lab’ notebook to tinker around and keep a USB stick featuring my goto tools with me when I’m on the road. As I keep important data in seperate backups I do not have a dedicated NomadBSD backup.
I clone my NomandBSD USB pendrive on another USB pendrive with same brand/model/size, using dd command in a terminal.
Keep the two pendrives more or less sincronized at every change, doing on the second one same just made to the first one. If something unrecoverable happens to one, then I clone from the other one
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My two cents. I don’t like a system that run on device that can be corrupted or damaged.
I installed NomadBSD on an old laptop Lenovo Thinkpad T410.
I used NomadBSD some months on an usb-ssd without installation but now I installed it on my laptop. It was just a practical solution because I needed the usb for other things.
I prefer an installation. The internal SSD is faster and the usb-slot is free.
That’s more for convenience and with my usb-ssd NomadBSD worked fast enough and fine,
I’ll maybe DD for backups just now until i get another laptop for a proper install.
need to keep a Win machine unfortunately for CAD purposes.
Speed isn’t my main concern , just want maximum reliability
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However you prefer to run it, always have a back up of your personal data on an external disk, you can always re install a system, but if you lose your personal data, it is gone!
I am using more USB sticks for systems than ever before. About 15 years ago, quite a few small systems became available that you could run live from a CD. What made their performance acceptable was that they had a small footprint and therefore everything could physically run in memory.
These days, with larger disks, including USB devices with 16 32, 64, even 128 GB of space and systems with 8-16 GB common even for commodity systems, running live with USB is viable.
I do that quite often, but I also keep many systems, so I don’t have a single point of failure for media, hardware, or software. In such scenarios I find running live to be quite doable, usable, and practical.
I’m with Mauro on this - keep it simple. I use DD between two sticks. Makes it easier when you lose your phd thesis at 3am and suddenly find your gui-driven custom backup application is crashing. 
With DD available everywhere, the amount of bootable tools to get to that is easy.
As for install - I tend to keep to the NomadBSD raison de’etre. From the about page
“NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD®.”
The installer is convenient for internal drives, but now you are no longer nomadic! Whether it’s across the room to another machine or another continent, you are fixed to one environment. They don’t call it Ball-n-chainBSD.
But I get it - it’s convenient to install it to an internal drive. These days I leave those alone - or at most totally wipe an internal drive as mere local storage and basically run from the USB stick boot.
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