1 (edited by Doktor Jones 2012-02-07 22:17:49)

Topic: Backing up and cloning Chumbies

I have two Infocast 8's that I am playing with... well, I'm playing with one at the moment.  Before I go too far and blow something up I thought it might be a good idea to back up the SD card like so:

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=32M | gzip -c > /mnt/usb/infocast8.img.gz

Q1:
Is this sufficient to back up the SD card from within the device such that if I completely nuked the software (failboot) and had to restore it (using an external system) I could just reload the image onto the SD card and be back in business?

Q2:
  a.
If the answer to Q1 is true, would I encounter any issues if I were to load the image onto the SD card of the second BB8 device?  I basically want to make both machines identical post-tweaking, and thought this might be a shortcut to doing so (rather than having to recreate all my work on the second unit).
  b.
If there is anything device-specific on the media, could I tweak some files to make it work?


(P.S.: piping dd through gzip takes a goofy long time on this thing!)

Re: Backing up and cloning Chumbies

I've never tried the above method; i physically remove the sd cards and dd them on a desktop machine.

dd if=/dev/sdc of=/backup.img

Then if I break anything and/or want to go back to default, I remove the sd card, plug into desktop and dd the image back onto the sd card.

dd if=backup.img of=/dev/sdc

I can vouch for backup images of one chumby working on another chumby--same goes for Infocasts.