Making a backup image

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  • Nojelc
    12. Januar 2018 at 11:23 #33371

    After quite a few hours of getting my m2p back to how it was I now want to make a backup in case things go wrong again.

    I have read the instructions here https://www.max2play.com/en/wiki/creating-an-image-backup/

    but this leaves me with a few questions. Firstly I am unclear as to whether I have expanded my file system, I was under the impression that I was supposed to do this, but from these instructions it seems that I should not have. As far as I remember I did hit that button, but I think I got a ’not required‘ message or something like that.

    The instructions say „Important: Make sure your usual image, that is supposed to be backed up, is smaller than the free space of your second SD card. By not expanding the filesystem of the usual image, its size remains much smaller.“

    How do I tell if my file system is expanded? My health checker reports „SD Card Usage: 18%“
    If it is expanded what can I do about it? How do I check if there is enough free space on my second SD card?

    Also I am left asking why I cannot write the image file to some othet media, rather than a second SD card. OK if I need to recover then I have an extra step of re-imaging an SD card from my stored image, as opposed to just plugging it in, but that should be easy enough.

    So :
    1) Can I use the image burner plugin to write the image of my original SD card that is still in the Pi to the USB HDD that is plugged into my PI and holds all my music – it has plenty of spare space.
    2) As above but to a 16GB USB stick plugged into my Pi.
    3) Can I take the SD card out of my Pi, attach it to a card reader on my Windows PC and use Win32 Disk Imager (which created the card image from a download of max2play in the first place) and use the Read function to copy image from Device to an Image file that I hold on my PC. Then if needed write it back later.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Nojelc.
    Nojelc
    14. Januar 2018 at 23:11 #33416

    I have created a backup of my max2play image very easily with my method 3) above. If you already have Win32 Disk Imager, e.g. used to create your Max2play SD card in the first place then this seems by far the easiest method. What I did was the following.
    1) Removed the SD card from my Pi and put it in a card reader attached to my PC.
    2) Used Win32 Disk Imager to read the SD card and write an image file to my PC.
    3) Formatted another SD card with the SD format utility (it had a Rasbian image on it, without a SD format the write fails)
    4) Used Win32 Disk Imager to write the file just created onto the second SD card.
    5) Booted my Pi from the second card. It came up perfectly with all my configuration as on the first card.

    So I now have a duplicate SD card image, and an image file for my max2play configuration stored on my PC. Perfect!

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Nojelc.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Nojelc.
    Heiner premium
    19. Januar 2018 at 11:13 #33532

    Hi Nojelc,

    Sorry about the late reply and thank you for following up your post.

    – You can use a SambaShare, a USB storage (path should be displayed in Filesystem/Mount) or network mount to directly save the backup file of your image on a different device in the Image Burner Plugin.
    – We added an automatic expansion of the filesystem, thanks for notifying us of an artifact from the manual expansion days
    – Method 3 of course also works 😉

    atmfrank premium
    17. Juli 2019 at 6:19 #46337

    What am I missing here? WinDiskImager 1.0 doesn’t read anything. It only wants to write an image file to a disk/SD card, not the other way around.

    thx

    Heiner premium
    17. Juli 2019 at 10:11 #46341

    Hi Frank,

    There should be a read option as well. However, you can also use our image burner plugin to read out an SD card if you have a second one.

    atmfrank premium
    18. Juli 2019 at 6:42 #46353

    Hello Heiner.

    There is a read option, but on a Windows machine, it will only read the contents of /boot and not the content of / which is actually the more interesting part.

    Getting back to using the „Imageburner“ plugin, it’s confusing as hell and doesn’t seem to achieve what I like to accomplish.
    I like to be able to create an exact clone of the /boot and / partitions and be able to boot the exact same image from that cloned SD.
    Using the SD Imager plugin and creating an „image copy“ on a spare SD results in nothing more than a kernel panic because it can’t mount /.

    Will it be able to do that and if so, how?

    Best greetings, -frank

    Heiner premium
    18. Juli 2019 at 10:26 #46355

    Hi Frank,

    We’ve never had any problems with the image burner plugin. Could you paste your error message here?

    Here’s the HowTo article on the plugin

    Nojelc
    29. Dezember 2019 at 15:16 #47844

    Just posting in this old thread to advise that Win32 Disk Imager, running on a windows PC, does read an image on an SD card without a problem. I have just done it to create a backup my image, it worked no problem at all

    Note that BalenaEtcher is now recommended, but Win32 Disk Imager has always worked for me.

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