If you want to run Bitcoind on a live system. make sure that your live media (e.g. usb drive) has more than 40 Gb of space. The blockchain itself takes over 30 Gb and it will continue to grow.
^^ This ^^
I've done something with
marginal similarities in Windows. The "trick" will be to have a fully populated datadir. The
-datadir=<dir> switch. If you choose to put you entire datadir on secondary media, then your wallet and other security sensitve data goes with it. If on the other hand you want to split your sensitive and nonsensitive data, that can be done with symlinks, but there could be some risk to this.
Bitcoin Core has had the ability to set the wallet file name with -wallet= for years. There is no need to rename files, and hasn't been a reason to do so for longer than your account here has existed. You cannot change the path because if you split the BDB recovery logs and wallet file itself onto seperate media you will end up with irreparabile data corruption if there is an unclean power off with (un)reasonable probablity.
The devs have stated in the past that splitting volumes may be dangerous to some LevelDB failure recovery conditions, so be aware of that.
This is how I split volumes on my Windows machine that offers a
marginally similar feature to linux symlinks.
Thread:
HOWTO: Run Windows Bitcoin-Qt with Blockchain elsewhere
