Use the built-in backup addon in libreelec. That copies your files rather than an image, so if you're only using 1GB that's how big (ish) your backup will be.
As trogggy mentioned, this method is the LE preferred route. If you need to reinstall for whatever reason, write a new image and just restore the backup.
There are methods in Linux to "shrink" and image but I'm not aware of a similar program in Windoze. You could try searching for one.
Can you provide logs files as explained in my signature
How about using clonezilla to clone to a separate sd card?
How about using clonezilla to clone to a separate sd card?
Never used this app. Will it produce smaller file backup size than real partition size?
In my case problem is not file size itself (I can still zip it) but more restore time
(win32 disk writer has to write every single byte on sd even if partition is mostly empty)
Never used this app. Will it produce smaller file backup size than real partition size?
In my case problem is not file size itself (I can still zip it) but more restore time
(win32 disk writer has to write every single byte on sd even if partition is mostly empty)
No, it won't reduce the size, it will clone the drive same as ghost, acronis etc
It is open source & can be run from a bootable cd/usb
If you get no further ideas, you can always try it, to see if it's fast enough for you
If you write down zero on filesystem's free space prior to making the image, then the image can be compressed with a good ratio using standard compression utils (zip, rar, 7zip, etc.).
I'd say defragmenting first helps to get better compression results but not sure on this.
In linux you can use zerofree for ext2/3/4 partitions. In windows SDelete can be used for "zeroing" free space.
The backup function in LE settings is just creating a standard .tar archive. To avoid all the unnecessary time and space issues of imaging the SD card just make a tar backup that includes the folders you need to backup. It's, really, not, hard.
I'm not interested to keep image small on my disk but looking more for recovery time
I've found this in the meantime GitHub - Drewsif/PiShrink: Make your pi images smaller!
Will give it try
Attempting this tool results in:
./pishrink.sh: line 10: syntax error: unexpected "("
I'm not the sharpest at linux, is this some kind of bash / shell thing? Where diff distros can process things slightly differently?
or am I doing something wrong?
.sh files are Linux shell/bash scripts. And an unexpected "(" is a program resulting from a boo-boo by the programmer, or it's possibly an incompatibility when running in a different Linux OS.
The same script runs on Ubuntu Server 20.04
LE runs "ash" from busybox, not "bash" (or dash) so shell differences could be the problem.
