Your 64 GB Ventoy drive has 40 GB sitting empty, and you keep reaching for a second pen drive for ordinary files. You do not need it. One of the quiet advantages of the Ventoy design is that the boot library and normal storage are the same space - as long as you respect three simple rules.
People assume a bootable drive is a sealed appliance. With Rufus that is nearly true - the drive is a formatted installer that the next write will erase. Ventoy is architecturally different: after its one-time install, the big partition is a normal exFAT drive that Windows, Linux and macOS read like any other. ISO files dropped there become bootable; everything else is simply stored. The boot menu lists only recognised image files and ignores the rest. That single fact turns one drive into your installer library and your everyday carry at the same time.
Ventoy scans the data partition for bootable image types - ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, VHDX and EFI files - including inside subfolders, and lists only those. Your documents, photos, driver folders and ZIP files are invisible to the menu and untouched by booting. Rename and organise freely: a folder called Drivers, one called Customer Files, ISOs grouped by type. The only naming care worth taking is with the images themselves - plain names without special characters keep the menu tidy and avoid the rare path quirks covered in the boot-failure case of this series.
Because the partition is exFAT rather than FAT32, the old 4 GB single-file ceiling does not apply - a 6 GB ISO, a disk image, a video project, all copy across as ordinary files. This is the same property that lets Ventoy sidestep the install.wim problem entirely: nothing is ever extracted onto a FAT32 volume. If you format the data partition yourself during a custom Ventoy install, choose exFAT (or NTFS) and keep that property; a FAT32 data partition would re-impose the limit for no benefit.
The contrast completes the comparison. A Rufus-written drive is a formatted installer: its partitions belong to the installation layout, personal files dropped there sit in borrowed space, and the next Rufus job - which formats the drive by design - erases them without asking twice. Nothing stops you technically, and everything about the workflow argues against it. The honest summary: Ventoy drives are storage that can also boot; Rufus drives are installers, and using each as what it is will save you exactly one painful data loss.
See the drive in the video - half installer library, half everyday files - and watch Windows offer to format the tiny boot partition you must never touch.
Watch Full VideoWindows shows the small VTOYEFI boot partition as an extra drive letter, and on some setups offers to format it because it cannot read the layout. Always cancel that prompt. The main data partition appears as a normal drive and needs no such interaction.
Yes - deleting, renaming or replacing an ISO on a Ventoy drive is a plain file operation with no effect on anything else stored there. That is the core convenience of the design. The same applies in reverse: your documents survive every Ventoy update.
Only the image scan matters, and it is quick even with dozens of images. Thousands of small unrelated files in deeply nested folders can add a moment; keeping images organised near the top of the drive keeps the menu instant.