I’ve noticed with the CE builds that not all thumbnails and content images are backed up. Perhaps this is because such large backup file are produced and some older boxes have issues restore large backups? This issue I’ve had is that if images aren’t in a backup it can take forever to restore them from information provider websites.
So could we have some options for backups please so that a full backup is possible if so desired?
My backups have the thumbs. But, you could also export the library database, to somewhere & then restore the db
The topic of including and excluding thumbnails has come up before and I can’t remember what today’s position is.
In the example thread above there is mention of an additional Backup addon from the official Kodi repository that allows you customisation to choose specific folders to backup in addition to the default and whenever I use the CE backup function, I also use Kodi backup, where I choose other folders that are not normally included. A useful belt and braces approach.
Perhaps K’s older LibreElec builds included everything, as I think they did, but CE only backs up certain folders? In my experience a FULL backup takes awhile, at least a couple of minutes perhaps longer, whereas the CE backup takes 10 seconds or so?
If there’s a Kodi addon then that’s great but maybe there’s a bug in recent CE builds if a full backup is supposed to happen? I’ve noticed this on the standard and the ng builds. The bottom line is that on slower internets connections it can take a very, very long time to download all the pix.
EDIT: My backup sizes are normally close to 1GB
EDIT 2: Just done a full back up with the script Compent mentioned above and it was 696MB as a zip. Haven’t tried restoring it yet but might at a later date just to check it all works OK.
EDIT 3: Forgot to mention the CE backup was 83MB as a tar!!!
CoreELEC skips thumbs because they take huge amounts of space, and take a huge amount of time to back up and restore, especially if you have slow media.
That’s what I experienced, so it is baked in. The option to save thumbs would be nice though.
I am doing two automatic full backups (including the /storage/.opt directory) weekly on an external disk drive when it is available, taking advantage of the daily restart of my CoreELEC devices running 24/7. As this occurs at a time when no one uses CoreELEC it does not matter that the backup takes 1 minute or 5 minutes.
Want to share my CoreELEC backup experience:
I’ve automated the backup process using restic, a remote backup program - It runs from a single binary, just copy to /storage and chmod. Then, I created a cron job to run daily incremental backups to my NAS.
restic allows fine-grained include/exclude of files and directories. Everything is backed up over the LAN so to minimise writes to the SD card.
Since CoreELEC is a full Linux OS, there’re many choices for making backups! 
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