Can I restore a Libreelec backup on a Pi with a 32GB card (using less than 16GB) to a 16gb card? I bought a new Pi and thought the old Pi had a 16gb card.
Can you restore to a different size card?
-
michaeljc70 -
July 11, 2018 at 1:38 AM -
Thread is Resolved
-
- Official Post
Yes/No depending on how you took the backup.
If you backed-up using our backup function you only copied the data within the filesystem (which is less than 16GB, usually not much more than 3-4GB even for a large media collection) so it should be quite simple to restore 3-4GB of data to a 16GB card. If you were inappropriately obsessed with "backing up the whole card" like most Pi users and you image dumped the full 32GB SD card, then no, you cannot restore the 32GB image to the smaller 16GB card without breaking the filesystem. It's still technically possible to break and then repair the filesystem, but that requires expert knowledge of filesystems and some software tools, and you need to hope all the data was within the first 16GB (likely, but not guaranteed).
If making backups, focus on the small amount of data on /storage, not the entire SD card. It's faster and easier to backup the ~4GB of data on the card than the full 16GB or 32GB of SD card which is mostly empty.
-
Yes/No depending on how you took the backup.
If you backed-up using our backup function you only copied the data within the filesystem (which is less than 16GB, usually not much more than 3-4GB even for a large media collection) so it should be quite simple to restore 3-4GB of data to a 16GB card. If you were inappropriately obsessed with "backing up the whole card" like most Pi users and you image dumped the full 32GB SD card, then no, you cannot restore the 32GB image to the smaller 16GB card without breaking the filesystem. It's still technically possible to break and then repair the filesystem, but that requires expert knowledge of filesystems and some software tools, and you need to hope all the data was within the first 16GB (likely, but not guaranteed).
If making backups, focus on the small amount of data on /storage, not the entire SD card. It's faster and easier to backup the ~4GB of data on the card than the full 16GB or 32GB of SD card which is mostly empty.
Okay. Thanks. I did the Libreelec backup from settings.
I know I could take an image of the 32gb card and shrink it using Linux mumbo jumbo, but this seemed easier since I am not really that familiar.
-
- Official Post
If restoring from within LE to a new card you need approx 2.5 times the backup file size in free space to perform the restore; because you have to copy the backup file to /storage first before the settings addon uncompresses the backup file during the restore process, and the OS requires some working buffer space during the archive extraction process. The backup file is just a standard .tar archive so there's no magic involved.
-
If restoring from within LE to a new card you need approx 2.5 times the backup file size in free space to perform the restore; because you have to copy the backup file to /storage first before the settings addon uncompresses the backup file during the restore process, and the OS requires some working buffer space during the archive extraction process. The backup file is just a standard .tar archive so there's no magic involved.
The backup file is around 2.8GB, so I should be okay.
