BBB Backup Question

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eagletree
 
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:03 am

BBB Backup Question

Post by eagletree »

I purchased both an RPi B+ and BBB Rev C from adafruit recently. I managed to get my RPi backed up rather easily since I can pop the SD card in my Mac and make an image with dd. But on the BBB, all the cookbooks I see talk creating an image on one's desktop in a similar manner. I don't understand that because it strikes me I could just put the SD into the BBB, and directly dd the running system to the SD. I realize this would be a potentially bad backup due to writes making it dirty and such, but is this a practical way to backup if one boots from the backup right away and tests it (cleaning the filesystem as necessary of course)? I really don't want to pull the BBB from it's location and bring it back to my computer. Can I just dd the booted drive to the SD and verify it later?

I see no one recommending or even mentioning this online. That's why I ask.

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adafruit2
 
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Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2005 7:36 pm

Re: BBB Backup Question

Post by adafruit2 »

We don't actually know, this is an excellent question for the BBB engineers at the google group - let us know what they say!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beaglebone

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TronDD
 
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Joined: Wed Sep 10, 2014 10:27 pm

Re: BBB Backup Question

Post by TronDD »

I struggled for hours to do this.

First of, there is a script someone wrote to boot off an SDcard and run dd automatically:
http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_Black_Extr ... C_contents

That script, however, does not work for the newer 4gig BBB. The webpages also neglects to mention that the FAT partition of your SDcard need to be marked active. Someone posted that in the comments. Most of the hours I lost was over that one little detail.

What I ended up doing was writing the latest Debian image to my SDcard, booting up, expanding the 2gig partition to the full size of my SDcard (you'll need 4gigs of free space for the dd dump), rebooting so that takes effect, then running the dd command from the original script.

Latest image: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images
Get the Debian image that can run off of the SDcard and doesn't flash to the eMMC. Write it to your card, make sure it's active, boot it up on the BBB.
Expand the partition with
$ cd /opt/scripts/tools/
$ sudo ./grow_partition.sh
$ sudo reboot
Reference: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBon ... _A_microSD

Upon reboot, I unmounted the eMMC partitions to make sure nothing gets written then ran dd
$ dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=BeagleBoneBlack-eMMC-image.img bs=10M

Tim.

eagletree
 
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:03 am

Re: BBB Backup Question

Post by eagletree »

Thanks for the reply, I'll study your links. When I went to the group noted above, they had said that it would require making a special SD disk to boot without flashing. Sounds like you have that set up. I did get as far as building the SD but don't recall if I started the boot process or not, I ended up on another project, and that was the only SD I had spare ;). I will revisit with your information.

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