You can easily use a USB storage device (USB stick, external self-powered hard drive etc.) to store your roms, personal files etc.
Recalbox can manually synchronize your USB device with your SD card. This step is optional but must be done before changing your USB storage settings. Here are the steps:
cd /recalbox/scripts
./recalbox-sync.sh list
# ./recalbox-sync.sh list
INTERNAL
DEV A80A-27A5 NO_NAME
So the name of my USB stick is NO_NAME, its device reference is A80A-27A5. I can synchronize it.
# ./recalbox-sync.sh sync A80A-27A5
sending incremental file list
./
.keep
bios/
bios/readme.txt
bios/readme.txt
...
sent 111,817,693 bytes received 8,256 bytes 9,723,995.57 bytes/sec
total size is 111,758,686 speedup is 1.00
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1178) [sender=3.1.2]
Here you go! Don't worry about the errors. Now your USB device contains the copy of the data from your SD card. You can continue with the next step.
Start button on your controller, go to SYSTEM SETTINGS > STORAGE DEVICE. Now select your device from the list, then confirm and wait for the system to reboot. During this reboot phase, Recalbox will create at the root of your device, a new directory named recalbox which will contain the whole tree of your /share partition.To add your files (roms, game backups, bios, scrape data etc...) to your storage device, you have two options:
With this method, the system (on the SD card) and the share partition (on the device) are separated. So if you were to reinstall your system, you would keep all your user data. You will then just have to reconnect your device to your recalbox, then select it in the system, and play.
Sometimes, after selecting the device in EmulationStation and restarting, Recalbox fails to create the file system on it. So it continues to use the files on the SD card. This happens especially with some hard drives that are slow to initialize.
What you can do:
cd /boot
nano recalbox-boot.conf
sharewait=30
Ctrl + X, Y to confirm and Enter.reboot and confirm, Recalbox restarts.If this still doesn't work, increase the value of sharewait.