I’m running CE 19.1 on a 32Gb SD… all media storage is out in my network so 32Gb is overkill. I’d like to have an image backup that is NOT 32Gb in size, allowing me to restore to alternative SDs that could be smaller and/or faster and/or more reliable.
In Raspberry PI land, this is a “shrunk image” that expands to fill the filesystem on first boot. CE does this too using the downloadable production images.
How do I do this? All the R-PI guides use tools that are not available in the stripped down CE environment. Any help would be appreciated.
@kartman, also you can make a CE backup of your present installation on 32Gb uSD card, then make a fresh installation on your smaller card and restore your backup to it.
Then simply make a backup image from this new smaller uSD card.
Yes, but why? There’s na way of shrinking the image to fit another card size, i did it once with the guidance of another team member because I had a backup (from an Ubuntu server) that was 32gb and wasn’t fitting another 32gb card (not all the cards have the same exact size). But in that case I needed a full image backup. In CoreELEC there’s the backup option.
Well in that case, won’t a bootable Clonezilla do the trick, where it can compress an image and also restore to disks of both larger and smaller sizes?
Don’t know why he needs it, but can tell why I use a safe copy of a full uSD card image. It’s much simpler (and faster) to burn a saved image of a full working system then go through complete new installation and CE restore procedure. Also, it’s a one more way to keep a backup of my full working system, just in case…
Generally I create a CE backup in the storage/backup folder then copy it over my network to my Nas.
Betatester made a guide to create a backup from directly from CE to a separate usb/SD card.
Note, as said, not all 32gb sticks or flash drives are exactly the same size. Clonezilla will not clone to a smaller size.
