Hello Pat
1. I suppose you talk about Linux running on the board. You loose changes when you turn it off because you certainly use a ramdisk and not a mass storage device (SD card, NAND, ...) for your filesystem.
2. To add some missing programs in your system would require to modify it with the Yocto build configuration, if you use it. Have you looked at NFS that could be another way to transfer files other the network.
Have you tried to boot another image? (I don't know if you use the prebuilt system in NOR flash, an prebuilt image or a compiled one).
Mathias