Wow, this is incredible! I looked and looked, but I couldn't find the site that had told me how to do my autologin back when I did it. There appear to be many different choices, depending whether you're using Light-DM or slim, or whatever. CONFUSED WAS I.

THEN, I took a chance and looked in my own saved installation notes from back then. And I found the instructions that I had saved, to make it easier to do autologins in the future:

LightDM configuration file is found at /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. Making a backup of the original configuration file is recommended.

Enable autologin

Look up this line in lightdm configuration file, UNCOMMENT IT and add your username.

CHANGE:
#autologin-user=

TO:
autologin-user=computerbob

NOTE: #autologin-user APPEARS IN TWO DIFFERENT PLACES IN THE LIGHTDM.CONF FILE.
THE ONLY ONE THAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED IS THE ONE IN WHICH THE EQUALS SIGN APPEARS IMMEDIATELY AFTER #autologin-user=

THE OTHER PLACE THAT IT APPEARS, THE EQUALS SIGN APPEARS AFTER A SPACE, LIKE THIS #autologin-user =
DON'T EDIT THAT LINE - ONLY EDIT THE LINE IN WHICH THE EQUALS SIGN APPEARS IMMEDIATELY AFTER #autologin-user

I'm so glad that my HD has a lot better (and longer) memory than I do! 

Thank you guys!!!! Seriously, YOU GUYS got it working. I just followed instructions.   

Thank you, again! And thank you for the link -- I look forward to learning a lot more about RefractaSnapshot, once enough of my brain cells have recovered! 

It is SO CLOSE!!!!

It was a scary process. I remember that it seemed to take a lot longer than in the past, to run the snapshot-creation program.

The "squashing" section itself probably took ten minutes, while the little pop-up gui feedback window never showed anything except that it reported 0% complete the whole time.

I think it may have been at the same time that the command line showed a progress bar that stayed at 0% for a long time, then jumped to 20,xxx for a long time, then 40,xxx for a long time, then completed without any further updates.

Then, I think the gui window disappeared for awhile, before returning to tell me that it was all done!

There was no longer any /etc/home/ folder. I found the iso and its SHA file in /media/data/snapshot/

Copying the iso to sdb took much longer than it had before. I considered that to be a GOOD sign, except that the only way I could tell that it was doing anything was by the quickly-flashing (not slowly-flashing) light on the USB stick.

Then, my USB stick BOOTED UP to my complete, auto-logged-in desktop (the autolog-in is intentional). But for only a few seconds.

Then it dropped back to a CLI screen with messages at the bottom, for only about one second, before returning to my desktop, with a login screen, autofilled with my username, for about 3 seconds.

Then back to the CLI screen for about one second, back to the desktop for about 3 seconds. After the 5th of 6th infinite circle or activities, I physically shut down my computer, and booted back to the HD again. That's how I'm typing this right now.

MAN, THIS IS SO COOL! IT IS SO CLOSE TO WORKING!!!!!!!!!   

I'll replace the older kernel with a newer fallback one, as you suggested.

"Perhaps you haven't created the snapshot correctly." IIRC, alll I did was click on the the default option to create the snapshot, and then it did everything else itself. Did I miss something? Do I need to run something else in addition to what I ran, to create the snapshots?

OK, I just removed/installed the kernels, exactly as you suggested. In Synaptic, that caused the following two packages to appear as "Installed (auto removable)":
irqbalance
runit helper

I have not removed those two packages (yet?), just in case you wanted me to NOT do that.

I will reboot and continue on to creating a new snapshot (hopefully, tomorrow). An entire day today, of trying to help in a domestic violence situation, and dealing with someone who just had a stroke, really tired me out... but I'll still be here again, as soon as I can. 

Now, it's a few minutes later. I just rebooted. A quick Catfish File Search of the whole File System  found 14 items with "squashfs" in their names. Five of them were folders, and 9 of them were files.  (???)

Good night! And Thanks. 

You are correct about sda and sdb. The sda drive with 4 partitions is my HD, my sdb USB stick was totally unallocated space until I copied the Snapshot to it -- I didn't intentionally create any partitions on it - maybe that was created by the copying process?

GParted currently shows me the following on my sda:

/dev/sda1     /
/dev/sda2     /home
/dev/sda3     /linux-swap
unallocated 9.69 GB
/dev/sda6     /media/data (102.54 GB of user data)

@ralph,
I just took your advice, but I don't know any way to attach my 4 photos to this forum message or to the private forum message that I sent you, and I don't have any photo-displaying service to put them on.  ;(

I don't know of any way to copy/paste it all here, but running

ls /dev/

at the (initramfs) prompt showed me 129 files, with several different names.

Yes, its contents are as follows:

# Driver inclusion policy selected during installation
# Note: this setting overrides the value set in the file
# /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
MODULES=dep

#
# initramfs.conf
# Configuration file for mkinitramfs(8). See initramfs.conf(5).
#
# Note that configuration options from this file can be overridden
# by config files in the /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d directory.

#
# MODULES: [ most | netboot | dep | list ]
#
# most - Add most filesystem and all harddrive drivers.
#
# dep - Try and guess which modules to load.
#
# netboot - Add the base modules, network modules, but skip block devices.
#
# list - Only include modules from the 'additional modules' list
#

MODULES=most

#
# BUSYBOX: [ y | n | auto ]
#
# Use busybox shell and utilities.  If set to n, klibc utilities will be used.
# If set to auto (or unset), busybox will be used if installed and klibc will
# be used otherwise.
#

BUSYBOX=auto

#
# KEYMAP: [ y | n ]
#
# Load a keymap during the initramfs stage.
#

KEYMAP=n

#
# COMPRESS: [ gzip | bzip2 | lz4 | lzma | lzop | xz ]
#

COMPRESS=gzip

#
# NFS Section of the config.
#

#
# DEVICE: ...
#
# Specify a specific network interface, like eth0
# Overridden by optional ip= or BOOTIF= bootarg
#

DEVICE=

#
# NFSROOT: [ auto | HOST:MOUNT ]
#

NFSROOT=auto

#
# RUNSIZE: ...
#
# The size of the /run tmpfs mount point, like 256M or 10%
# Overridden by optional initramfs.runsize= bootarg
#

RUNSIZE=10%

Even before I run that command, in Thunar, I can see one /grub/ folder and eight files  inside the /boot/ folder, but I'm guessing that the ls command itself might show you those anyway:

computerbob@robinson:~$ ls -lh /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 24M Mar 13 13:12 /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-14-amd64
computerbob@robinson:~$ 

Since I really don't know what I'm doing, here's a different version of the same ls command, to show the entire contents of that folder:

computerbob@robinson:~$ ls -lh /boot
total 44M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 202K Jan 30 04:35 config-4.19.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 183K Dec 17 07:51 config-4.9.0-14-amd64
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4.0K Mar 10 10:30 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  24M Mar 13 13:12 initrd.img-4.19.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.7M Dec 18 13:22 initrd.img-4.9.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.3M Jan 30 04:35 System.map-4.19.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.1M Dec 17 07:51 System.map-4.9.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5.1M Jan 30 04:35 vmlinuz-4.19.0-14-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1M Dec 17 07:51 vmlinuz-4.9.0-14-amd64
computerbob@robinson:~$ 

For the first time in many years, I used the first (simpler) install option, instead of the more-detailed expert install option, installing Beowulf onto partitions that I had already created in GParted. I don't remember if that gave me the option to install only specific drivers or all drivers. However, if it DID give me that option, I know that -- in the past - - I've always chosen to install ALL drivers.

Yes, everything I saw was there and, and far as I could tell, it all looked like real files. I haven't checked the USB stick yet. I may or may be able to figure out how to do that. Is there ANY possibility that there are snapshot FILES on my HD, but they're somehow converted to symlinks on my USB stick when I'm copying them there? So my USB stick boots (linked to existing files on my HD), until it wants something that it can't find. I'm just shooting in the dark here, so just ignore me if my ideas are not helpful.   

NEVER MIND - I figured out how to mount my USB stick and view its various contents, using terminal commands. Everything I've seen there looks like REAL files, not symlinks. Man, this stuff is a real challenge to me!