Backup from Pi3 to Pi2?

Dominus

I made a backup of my Micro SD card from my Raspberry Pi 3, version 4.1.5, no overclocking. I am wondering if I am now able to write that backup to a new SD card, and it would still work on my older Raspberry Pi2-B??

backstander

@Dominus

We might verify with one of the admins here but from my understanding, the premade version of RetroPie for Pi 2 & 3 are compiled on a Pi2 so you should be able to do this without any issues. If it was me and just to be safe, on the Pi 2 I would run the RetroPie-Setup Script and then Update All Installed Packages. This will re-download all the newest binaries and recompile everything that was installed by source.

mrbwa1

@Dominus Did you install Retropie yourself on the Pi3 or did you download and use the pre-build image?

The pre-built image may work okay, but IIRC if you installed yourself, it will be optimized for the Pi3.

In either case, I think it should at least boot the Pi, but may not go into emulationstation. In that case, you should be able to run the Retropie setup script and Update All Installed packages on the Pi2. That should bring in everything correctly and then work.

Note: I haven't done this myself, but it has been asked before in the forums and this was the recommended fix.

Dominus

Nope did it myself. Bought a Pi3 for a present, fixed it all up, and I just want to be able to copy that image to my old Pi2. Thanks for the info, I will try updating after I've written the image.

BuZz

The premade image will work, but anything built later from source will not - this includes things like drivers etc that may have been added (some are source only).

mrbwa1

@Dominus said in Backup from Pi3 to Pi2?:

Nope did it myself. Bought a Pi3 for a present, fixed it all up, and I just want to be able to copy that image to my old Pi2. Thanks for the info, I will try updating after I've written the image.

One more thing, if you sent up a Manual overclock on the Pi3, you'll want to probably edit the bood config.txt or it might cause issues on the Pi2 as it can't run at those speeds.

Again, I haven't do it that way, but I dod go from a Pi2 to a Pi3 and it kept my "screaming" 1000 Mhz overclock on the Pi3 until I manually edited the boot config.