xXx

Sure, i can do that. I'm a bit short of time these days, but at some point (hopefully soon) i'll post a new script with all the changes.

@balbes150 Thanks for the info. Can you try at some point the "problematic" box with uncompressed backup and restore? I never use the "modern" stock terminal colors ( say white background ), but i'll try to change the colors used in the script to something more "universal" in the next version.

Tested compressed backups today in x96 boxes, and backup and restore works as expected. This is the box tested ( 2 of them )

Yesterday a friend came by and asked me to demonstrate to him, my MiniM8S box running Balbes150 ubuntu image from SDCARD. So i did. After a few happy minutes he asked me to demonstrate to him LibreELEC running from the same box but from internal 8GB memory. So i shutted down the box, pulled out power adapted and SDCARD with ubuntu, and put the power adapter back so the box it will boot in LibreELEC. Then my friend noticed that the cables was a mess, and pulled out the power adapter while LibreELEC was booting, untangled it, and put it back. Well... the emmc got broken and the box didn't boot anymore to LibreELEC. Luckily it was booting fine to Ubuntu Xenial from SDCARD, and i had a backup from my emmc with LibreELEC from when i was creating my dd_backup script. I run the script, did it's magic and LibreELEC was back in life in 30 minutes, with all my configurations and plugins in place. The image as you can see in the screenshot was compressed (what you cannot see is that is 221.5 MB instead of 8 GB) but this was not a problem for my box. I spend a few more hours configuring some more my MiniM8S, and right now that is completely fine-tuned i'm taking a fresh backup.

If i'm not mistaken, all images are universal, at least for me that was the case. I only had to put the correct dtb.img for my system in the root of the FAT partition in the SDCARD for my system to boot. I use rufus in windows, and dd or disks in linux to write the images to SDCARDS.

I am running Armbian_5.24_Amlogic-s905x_Ubuntu_xenial_3.14.29_desktop_20161227.img.xz from SD CARD while libreelec is installed on internal memory. My system is Mini M8S.

Hello everyone! I have updated and tested the BACKUP/RESTORE script in many situations. Below are some screenshots of the script in action: Here is the finished BACKUP/RESTORE script: You can also download the script from here Please test the script and report any bugs.

Here is some more info about the box: And the available space on the box looks OK to me: df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 805M 0 805M 0% /dev tmpfs 182M 8.0M 174M 5% /run /dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 4.0G 25G 14% / tmpfs 908M 112K 908M 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 908M 0 908M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 908M 72K 908M 1% /tmp /dev/mmcblk0p1 64M 46M 19M 71% /boot tmpfs 182M 28K 182M 1% /run/user/1000 tmpfs 182M 0 182M 0% /run/user/0 /dev/data 4.7G 722M 4.0G 16% /media/data

Hello again! Mini M8S here as i said before. I installed Armbian_5.24_Amlogic-s905x_Ubuntu_xenial_3.14.29_desktop_20161227.img.xz from the Test directory, and i can confirm that video playback is much better with ubuntu. Youtube is also OK if not in fullscreen mode. Also the crashes in mpv and vlc not happening with this ubuntu test image. Tried with SD and USB drives and both boot OK with dtb.img taken from my LibreELEC USB stick (7.0.3.011). I tried installing this system in emmc 6 times with the included script "install.sh". 3 times while booted from SD CARD, and 3 times while booted from USB stick. Each time installation went OK, but the system was never able to boot from emmc. There is something i am missing here for sure. I don't need or even want the official android OS, but i tried to restore it in order to confirm if compressed dd images will work or not. I restored my compressed image with this command while booted from my reliable SD CARD: gunzip -c /root/Amlogic-020b-emmc.img.gz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1 My system came UP in the state it was when i backed it up. So the good news here is that Mini M8S emmc can be backed up with compression and restored without problems. But be carefull: Maybe this is not the case with every system as balbes150 have pointed out to me. Thanks in advance for any info about how to boot MiniM8S from emmc.

What i meant by the term "USB BOOTERS" is this: People that used SD CARD to boot to armbian and to backup their internal emmc is "SD BOOTERS" for me. People that user USB FLASH to boot to armbian and to backup their internal emmc is "USB BOOTERS" for me. The script that i posted earlier does NOT HANDLE "USB BOOTERS" and expects one to have booted the system from SD CARD. This will change in the next version of the script, since i am now able to start the system from USB FLASH, and test it in the "real thing". I apologize if my bad english caused any misunderstandings.

@balbes150 No! I have never tried to restore yet as i am still learning the ins and outs of this box ( Mini M8S ) in conjunction with this distro ( armbian ). But i have created 4 times uncompressed image of my emmc, and 4 times compressed. Then all 4 times, the uncompressed images and the extracted compressed images checked with md5 and was identical. So... if the uncompressed boots, then the compressed should boot the same. Well... the problem you described maybe is emmc brand specific, or my emmc is from a good or standards compatible brand? Only the brave testers will answer that. Anyway... i thing i'll get brave soon ;-) I'm also working on the script to accept USB booters ( not only SD booters ) so it will be easy to add a dialog for the user to deny compression. When the script will be well tested and error-free, i'll post it back here. My 5 cent info again: I used usb boot with the test image Armbian_5.24_Amlogic-s905x_Debian_jessie_3.14.29_desktop_20161227.img.xz today and: 1) mpv and vlc still not able to play videos in real time ( audio is OK ) glxinfo says "direct rendering: yes" 2) when i put mpv (and vlc) in fullscreen the video and the program freezes, but the audio keeps looping the last few second it had in memory until i reboot ( killing mpv,vlc e.t.c. by hand never helped stoping the loop ). 3) I had to put "amlogics905x_init.sh" from "v_5.24" folder in the root of my usb in order to have 1080p resolution, but it varies from boot to boot with corrupted graphics. I have read all the post in this thread and i still don't know many things, so maybe i'm doing something wrong. Thanks again.

Hi to all! My first post here... First of all i am running Armbian_5.24_Amlogic-s905x_Debian_jessie_3.14.29_20161223.img on MiniM8S 2G MEM / 8G EMMC I'm impressed with the performance of the box, and a big THANK YOU to balbes150 for his work. I had to put dtb.img from LibreELEC image to my (Armbian_5.24...20161223.img) SD CARD in order to be able to boot it on my system ( otherwise only archlinux it was able to boot without dtb.img ). I put MATE XORG on top of that and everything is OK except two things: 1) Video performance of mpv is a no-go ( No hardware accel ? ) 2) My HDMI resolution is on 1280x720 only. I'm quite new to this armbian distro, and there any many things i don't know (some how and why things i believe ) I can confirm that running pacman -Syu in archlinux ( ArchLinux_4Gb_20161201.img.gz ) bricked my MiniM8S ( a thing that was expected after all ) and i had to do the pin sorting method + USB Burning Tool in Windows to bring it back to life. I'm not asking questions here (mainly), just my 5 cent of information. @balbes150 Here is a script that i wrote to automate the process of backing up the internal EMMC in debian ( and hopefully ubuntu ) in case i ( or someone else ) would like to put armbian in EMMC The script works great for me, and does some checks and takes decisions. Maybe you find a use for this in your next images. If someone try the script and find any bugs i will be glad to squash them Here is the script: #!/bin/bash # Author: xXx # Purpose: Automate the process of backing up internal storage. # Date: 4 Jan 2017 20:22:00 EET reset _r=$(tput setaf 1) _g=$(tput setaf 2) _b=$(tput setaf 4) _y=$(tput setaf 3) _x=$(tput sgr0) OUTDIR="/root" [ $(whoami) != root ] && echo "$_r Please run this program as root""$_x" && exit 1 avail=$(lsblk | grep -oE mmcblk[0-9] | sort | uniq) runfrom=$(lsblk | grep /$ | grep -oE mmcblk[0-9]) emmc=$(echo $avail | sed "s/$runfrom//" | sed "s/ //g") image=$(echo $(cat /proc/cpuinfo | egrep '(Hardware|Revision)' | awk '{print $3}') | sed "s/ /-/g")-emmc.img [ -f $OUTDIR/$image.gz ] && echo "$_y DELETING PREVIOUSLY CREATED IMAGE...""$_x" && rm -rf $OUTDIR/$image intsize=$(fdisk -s /dev/$emmc) rootfree=$(df | grep /$ | awk '{print $4}') echo "$_b AVAILABLE DEVICES: "$_g"$(echo $avail)""$_x" echo "$_b YOU ARE RUNNING "$_g"$(lsb_release -c | awk '{print $2}')"$_b" FROM "$_g"$runfrom""$_x" echo "$_b INTERNAL EMMC IS: "$_g"$emmc"$_b" SIZE: "$_g"$intsize""$_x" echo "$_b ROOT FREE SPACE IS: "$_g"$rootfree""$_x" [ $rootfree -le $intsize ] && echo "$_r NOT ENOUGH FREE SPACE!!! $_x" && exit 1 echo "$_b JOB STARTED!"$_x"" echo "$_b SAVING AND COMPRESSING TO "$_g"$OUTDIR/$image.gz"$_x"..." dd if=/dev/$emmc | pv -s $intsize"K" | gzip > $OUTDIR/$image.gz echo "$_g JOB FINISHED!"$_x""