I have been using Clonzilla for years and it never let me down.

I run it from an live USB stick on my Desktop PC. It has some learning curve but you will find a lot of tutorials online. Running "disk to local image" to backup and "local image to disk" to restore with the defaults should be enough as a start.

As long as the source hardware from where you make the backup and the target restore hardware are the same make and model it should go smooth (i.e. Rpi4 -> Rpi4, SD-card make and model can differ but obviously the size of the target should be same as source or larger).

I assume you only use the SD card for RetroPie and not a mix of SD-card and SSD drive for RetroPie.

Do you use a SD-Card reader via USB in your Desktop PC or is the SD card directly put into the PC's SD-card reader? (I am asking as I have seen USB SD-Card readers failing).

@nixzero said in How to save controller configurations to IMG backup?:

Does this provide any clues?

Not really, the Joy2key keyboard messages are ok since they're associated with the runcommand menu and the joy2key utility. However, the fact that there are no disconnects for your physical gamepads means their connection is fine - it's what the dmesg command was used for.

@CaptRobovski said in Can I backup current emulator state - corrupted memory stick:

A quick question - should the filename under etc/udev/rules.d end in the suffix '.rules' ? I have other files in there, such as 99-input.rules, 99-bluetooth.rules.

No, the extension is not needed. Only the lexically order may be relevant of all rule files (cf. man udev -> RULES FILES).

The memory stick has left the factory mostly fine I would assume. It is the firmware that make things worse in use cases like this (as likely the USB spec has not been implemented by the letter by the vendor).

If you change make and model of the memory stick you may leave the power control rule enabled (adapt to the VID/PID). Does not have an impact unless you run on battery.

Or you can make a backup of you new memory stick and run it without the power control rule. If things repeat restore the memory stick and enable the rule.
However, if it repeats on a different make/model the issue could also be caused by the RaspBerry Pi Kernel USB implementation.

@tribunal88 With all the counterfeits around, it's actually hard to be sure whether a sd card is good quality or not.
A standard OS is constantly reading/writing to the storage device (logs, background tasks, ...). Arguably this can be mostly disabled by editing your system files, but i don't think it's done by default on a retropie setup.

@mitu My note about continuing to use related to my original post. So... Am I able to run the backup from the same pi that I'm using retropie on, whilst for example playing games at the same time?

What I'm wanting to avoid is having to use my windows laptop for the process as it's used for other things by the family and robocopy is so slow.

Ideally, I'd want to back up the ROMs on the usb directly to a network drive but all from within the pi (so that this can happen in the background and other life can carry on!)

I've managed to find some helpful tips for using rsync so will investigate those as well

@10vorne said in Samba and /opt/retropie/configs:

@sleve_mcdichael Just to be sure, the config folder shared by Samba by default is the config folder under /opt/retropie/configs?

That's correct. You can look inside it and verify.

@navi87 It's working for me but i don't have google drive installed. i have the latest version (January 10, 2023): https://win32diskimager.org/ . Try to reinstall the latest version.

@sleve_mcdichael though most games seem to work without vfsroot available, I'm not sure it's not internally used somewhere.

If preview.bmp does not already exist in $romdir/ports/cgenius/games/[game], one will be created in ~/.CommanderGenius/games/[game] (since these are no longer linked to the same place.) If it does exist in $romdir, nothing is created in ~/.CommanderGenius.

Is this broken or legit?

I don't think it's broken.

@mitu said in Which files/folders to backup?:

@retrodaniel said in Which files/folders to backup?:

know that I changed the configuration of some games specifically during emulation, but I have no idea where those are stored. Could anyone point me to where they are, please?

The overrides for cores/games should be stored in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/configs, each core has its own folder for overrides. If you're backing up /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch, it should be enough - you can restore them afterwards.

Other than that, the backed up folders you mentioned should be enough.

Amazing! Thank you for the help :)

@retropieuser555 I don't care about save game files because this is a project for kids from a friend of mine. I worked on it for some time and then I'd left it because of other priorities. When I touched it again, it started to mess up....

You can install the desktop on the RetroPie image and other packages (including a browser) so you can operate directly from the Pi. See here.

Does the RAW backup then also occupy as much space as there is data on the SD card or is it then a 1:1 image of the entire SD card and its capacity?

If you look in the topic for the utility I pointed, there's an explanation on how much space does it take - it will initially create a full block copy of your sdcard, then shrink it to the actual size of used blocks. So you need to have enough space on your USB disc for a full sdcard copy.

Looks like the upstream libretro assets repository renamed them and the upgrade script just adds the new files, without removing the older ones. Maybe we should clear up the folder before the upgrade, to avoid this issue.

@hellothere You may also consider using rsync in conjunction with crontab.

@valabrax said in Which files/directories should I restore after doing a fresh image install?:

Looking at the backup methods on https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/ I think the best one for me in this situation is to backup the bios, configs, and roms directories via the samba shares. However, assuming the update works perfectly, which of these directories should I copy back over to preserve my roms, save states/files, and configurations (like controller configs and core-level configs). I'm assuming just the roms and configs directory and that I should not copy bios back over to the new image, but I wanted to check and be sure.

as the docs says, you'll want to backup all 3 https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/#backup-option-2

By installing from source and now doing a new image install, am I nuking my micro-sd card with writes? I have no idea how many writes an install from source does, but it took hours to finish.

it's not ideal but during development i do many days worth of rebuilds and my SD cards tend to last years before crapping out.

Looks like a good use case for git on LAN? You can tag or branch your config sets rolled out for other machines than yours. Later merge all your latest and greatest changes from your machine into the friends' branches from time to time. If something breaks you can easily go back in time.

@erbright said in Unable To Backup RetroPie Image:

Win32DiskImager - Doesn’t work. I create the image and try to mount it to make sure it works and Windows tells me it's corrupted. This happens over and over again.

This is all you needed to do, it did work, you just can't mount it under Windows.

@mitu found a way to acces the SD card with "Linux Reader" actualy copying fies and it takes ages but better than nothing.

You could use something like FSArchiver to backup the individual /boot and / partitions (excluding ROMS). dd could be used for individual partitions, from a separate Linux system (/ shouldn't be active when dd is run). FSArchiver is included in the live boot System Rescue image, you can use it to restore/backup from a separate PC, without installing Linux on your PC.