How to stay up to date / save work done

10vorne

The current Retropie installation is the second I've done so far. The older one is now about 3-4 years old. At some point there were no more updates, but the system was running. Now I wanted to set up a new installation, but now I'm wondering whether there is a way to always keep it up to date. So all the configuration work, scraper info, savegames, etc. should be retained.

So how do you do it? Do you just stay on the latest current version that your system provides because not much will change in the future with the emulators, etc. anyway? Or is there a way to upgrade older Retropie installations? Or do you simply copy config files, etc. to a new system?

I would be interested to know how you had it. I'm not very experienced with Linux, but would put in the work necessary to avoid having to redo work once done on my Retropie installation, unless I feel like it :)

sleve_mcdichael

@10vorne said in How to stay up to date / save work done:

Or is there a way to upgrade older Retropie installations? Or do you simply copy config files, etc. to a new system?

Yeah, that's it. If it's on the network share (navigate to \\retropie on your PC), you just need to backup the roms, configs and if you use them, bios and/or splashscreens folders to your PC and then copy them back over to the new install once you get it on the network too. This doesn't get 100% of your system migrated but it's a good 9/10 of the way there. All that's left is to reinstall things like themes and additional optional packages (alternate emulators, game engines for ports, etc.) through the Setup script.

10vorne

@sleve_mcdichael

Does that mean that the scraper information that I collect over time is also saved here and will be taken over?

A friend of mine has a Raspberry 4. So if I want to save him the "work", I install a fresh retropie on his system and transfer the mentioned three folders from my installation (incl. the mentioned optional packages) and that's it?

The SD card from my 3-series Raspi will certainly not just run on the 4-series, right?

sleve_mcdichael

@10vorne said in How to stay up to date / save work done:

Does that mean that the scraper information that I collect over time is also saved here and will be taken over?

Yeah, the scraped info does gets carried over. Textual data is in the gamelist.xml which, depending on your setup, may be in the roms or configs folder, and the images are in configs/all/emulationstation.

The SD card from my 3-series Raspi will certainly not just run on the 4-series, right?

That is correct, it's pretty easy but not that easy.

10vorne

@sleve_mcdichael I now use skyscraper for scraping. I've run through a few systems in the meantime and have now found that the scraper info is saved in /home/pi/.emulationstation/... .

I've now seen that you can set Skyscraper's options (no default) to save the game list and the data in the ROM folder, which would be better in terms of backup, because the scrape-data would then also be in one of the four folders (Config, Bios, Roms, Splashscreens).

If I now change the option in Skyscraper and have the game list created again (without having to reload all the information from the Internet), will everything be copied over? Or what should I do best here?

sleve_mcdichael

@10vorne the default location is backed up too. ~/.emulationstation is symlinked to /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation, which is the same configs as what you see in the four folders.

If you do change the output (gamelist) and/or media path, then after generating a new list, you will have data (gamelists and/or media) in both locations.

EmulationStation will use the gamelist from the roms folder first if it finds one there, and only look in .emulationstation as a fallback if the first one doesn't exist. It will use the media folder that is defined in whichever gamelist it ends up using.

If you do change the path, you'll end up with duplicates. Go ahead and manually clean up the one you're no longer using, it won't be done automatically.

10vorne

@sleve_mcdichael
Ok, since I had only seen the directories when starting Skyscraper, I wasn't aware of the symlinks. In the end, this also means that I don't have to change anything in the configuration and I leave it as the default. I just want to have everything in the four directories so that I have everything together when I switch to a new version.

Maybe another question about the update, I can run Retropie-Setup-Script-Update and Basic Install from time to time without having to change or pay attention to anything else. So I'm not overwriting anything of my existing custom configuration, right?

I make backups of the whole sd-card as an image. But can I also mount the image without any problems in order to copy only the data from the four directories out again? Or do I save the image just to use it again as a whole and should I save only the directories again just in case?