Fooocus and Persistent Storage

Hi everyone, I am trying to get Fooocus up and running along with a persistent storage as restarting the machine and waiting for all the python libraries as well as the model files to be downloaded is pain.
I tried to follow this guide: How to mount persistent disk to HF Spaces In Docker? but I had no visible results from it (the machine would go ahead and install all the dependencies anyway) Then I’ve tried to switch to gradio (using Fooocus/launch.py at main · lllyasviel/Fooocus · GitHub) which was also no help as even though the build was successful and the log said it was listening on port xxx, huggingface would get stuck on loading. Please find my README.md file below. All other files are exactly the same as Fooocus repository on GitHub.

title: Fooocus1
emoji: 👁
colorFrom: red
colorTo: gray
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 4.19.2
app_file: launch.py
pinned: true

I assume a feature like persistent storage in an app like hf should be pretty simple and straightforward so I’m probably missing something very crucial. Could you please help me sort it out?