Backup my retropie error?

djaay

Ok, this may be more of a "berryboot" question then RetroPie. But hoping someone else runs the same setup and someone can help me out backing up my RetroPie image. I have berryboot 2.0, RetroPie 4.2 and OSMC. Running on a Pi 3.

I have been doing backups lately to a 64 Gb USB stick. It´s about 50Gb free space. I have been doing this from within Berryboot. Clicking on Backup and then choosing backup original image + uncompressed data.

But after adding a couple of Gb of game roms i get this error:

mksquashfs error:
Warning: Cannot get size of physical memory, probobly because /proc is missing.
Warning: Defaulting to minimal use of 16 Mbytes use -mem to set a better value, or fix /proc.
Write failed because File too large
FATAL ERROR: Failed to write to output filesystem
Parallel mksquashfs: Using 4 processors
Creating 4.0 filesystem on /media/sda1/test.img, block size 131072

From what i understand...the /proc is missing? what? how can that be? Image to large? It´s about 11 Gb from what i can understand by booting up in RetroPie and looking at Disk space used (in the console mode).

How can an 11 Gb image not fit on a 50Gb USB stick?

Hope somebody can help me out to do a backup of my RetroPie image.

jesterking

So I created an account just to reply to this... Hopefully I am right as I have the exact same problem as you.

I believe the file size issue comes down to what the USB is formatted in. If it's FAT32, you have a 4 gb file limitation. Anything over 4 gigs and it wont write to the USB. If it's NTFS, thats a different story and its up in the Terabytes. That being said, I've tried using NTFS and the RP3 doesn't recognize the drive. So what I just did, literally just this second (your post clued me in on the file format limitations), I put my USB in the RP3 and choose the "clone SD Card" option. The system then formatted in ext4 (linux default file format) and it's going through the process as I type... I did just get an "Error: failed to copy", but I clicked ok and it seems to still be going through... The RP3 shows that it's still copying, and my USB is flashing away as it's being written to.

I'll report back the outcome. Not too sure I want to try to load a backup that did have an error in the beginning of the process. But at least I didn't get that entire error rant again.

jesterking

So I ended up canceling the original back up try and rebooted... figured, why not try to get a backup in without the errors. So, after the reboot, I attempted the same process as above. After I came back from lunch the backup was done without error. Then I let retropie load normally, and f4 out of emulationstation to bring me to the command line. cd /media/usb
and there was all the backups. All is well with the world. The only thing that sucks is that now the USB drive is pretty much useless outside of linux. No Buenos. So later tonight I will SSH into the system and pull the files off of the USB onto my laptop and figure out a better place to store them... Hope this helps.

mediamogul

@jesterking

The only thing that sucks is that now the USB drive is pretty much useless outside of linux.

It's possible to add EXT4 support to Windows and OSX.

jesterking

@mediamogul

Yeah I just connected my usb to my pc and it was able to read it no problem... interestingly though, I can't format it to ext4. Either way, it seems to work. I'd suggest OP look into the method that I used. total size of the backup says 55.3 mb... not too sure how that works out. Eitherway, I'll give it a test sometime this week and report back my findings. Just have to setup a VM for it first...

edit:
Also, when I said outside of Linux, I meant in other devices... I should have been more clear. I use this USB drive to store mp3's for my car... it doesn't recognize ext4 partitions.

jesterking

OK, I know I've posted a lot of stuff here in the last few days... I thought I had a solution but it wasn't complete. That being said, the best (and really the most simple without getting too technical) method of backing up the entire SD card that I could find is in this link:
http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-backup-your-raspberry-pi/

It's a shame that berryboot's native backup methods are broken. Also, it would be nice if Retropie had the ability to create an image of itself... Maybe a pre-boot command before it's mounted? Not sure how to go about that. Either way, Berryboot doesn't seem to have a reasonable method of creating an image file of the current setup/instances. So just copying the whole dang SD card seems to be the only real method.

mediamogul

@jesterking said in Backup my retropie error?:

That being said, the best... method of backing up the entire SD card that I could find is in this link

At the end of the day, making an sd backup externally really is the best, most all-encompassing method. The same advice is given in the official RetoPie documentation as well.

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/updating-retropie#making-a-backup-option-1