Armbian rpi-clone script

[Virgus]

I need to clone a bigger (almost empty) sd card to a smaller one.

I use rpi-clone on RPIs but since armbian has a single partition rpi-clone (or its forks) doesn't seem to work :-/

 

https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone.git

https://github.com/KoljaWindeler/pi-clone

https://github.com/wbphelps/rpi-clone-wm.git
 

Has anybody used successfully rpi-clone or other similar scripts on armbian?

 

What is the best way for creating the smallest img files possible?

 

With my RPIs I clone SDs to smaller ones, then I "zerofree" the created card and I backup it to an image file.

I'm currently using this software on Windows which creates compressed img files so that I have no need of zipping files,

but there might be better options out there... Please share with me your experiences about efficient (and possibly fast) backups.

 

Thanks,

V.

[Igor]

Check this:

 

https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/blob/second/common.sh#L240

 

Input is RAW image, output minimal RAW image with 15% free space.

 

Works with one or two partition.

[Virgus]

That's great Igor,

thank you so much, it will be really a useful script to use from now on.

 

For the raw image, since the BPIs have the SATA drive, is it fine to simply use DD?

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/mnt/sda1/SD_Backups/BPiArmbian.raw

 

I'm trying it for the first time, is there a way with dd to copy only the used part of the SD,

to speed up the process?

 

Thanks again,

V.

[Igor]

DD is direct copy and you can use it almost anywhere.

If you want to speed up the process - shrink data partition on the drive, save only partitions (separate) and expand back. But in this case you are not saving the boot loader. You need to save it separate.

[Virgus]

Hello Igor, I had problems trying to use your function shrinking_raw_image () directly on the Armbian release I'm using.

 

So I tried copying the partition as you suggested but the "cloned" card did not boot.

I used some instructions I found on the web to extract the bootloader from the MBR backup

#Backup MBR
dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/usr/local/sbin/mbr_sdcard.img bs=512 count=1
#Restore Bootloader
dd if=/usr/local/sbin/mbr_sdcard.img of=/dev/sdd bs=446 count=1

According to what I understood Armbian SD card consists only of bootloader MBR and the ext4 partition. Am I correct?

 

Besides the former commands I did the following: created a single ext4 partition on an external sdcard, mounted it to /mnt/sdd1 and rsynced the contents from mmcblk0 to sdd1. This is more or less the sequence of actions used by rpi-clone scripts.

 

Am I missing something?

[Igor]

This scripts is designed to work with images. So it's only an example / idea , not for direct usage in your scenario.

 

I am not sure that bs=512 is enough. It's different for each board architecture so double check.

 

This is how we write it Allwinner:

 

dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=8

 

Yes, armbian has only one ext4 partition.

[Virgus]

Hello Igor I tried without success but at the end I found a solution (sort of).

I restored a clean Armbian raw image to my sd and then zeroed it

and used rsync to backup my original sd to the smaller one.

Rsync took less than 2 minutes (2Gb of data on my SD) and I now have a compressed raw of 1.3GB!

 

Not the ideal solution but it's a good compromise at least.

 

Thanks and have a nice day,
V.