Clone to a (slightly) smaller disk for RPi4

LybsterKodi · May 28, 2022 at 2:50 PM

I want to backup the entire SSD I'm using for Kodi. I have a spare HDD and a USB memory stick. The Kodi SSD is supposed to be 120GB, the HDD also 120GB and the USB stick 128GB. My problem is that both the HDD and the USB stick are in reality a few GB smaller than the SSD. I have tried various cloning software (including Clonezilla in advanced mode on my Linux PC) and each time the clone seems fine but when pluged into my RPi4 fails to boot fully.

What happens is that the colour gradient square comes up and nothing else happens. Burning a clean image onto the HDD or USB stick and everything works.

Either I have to go out and buy another SSD or there is something magical I'm missing. I hope the latter.

**chewitt** · May 28, 2022 at 3:44 PM

Cloning requries you to duplicate the entire filesystem, and filesystems have all kinds of checks and such to detect corruption; hence when the size of source and target aren't the same it all goes wrong. Instead make a backup and then restore it to the target; this way you are working only with the content of the filesystem and not the entire disk. The content of the filesystem is a lot smaller, more manageable and thus the process is also quicker.

TL/DR; learn how to use tar .. make a backup, then restore the backup. LE settings has this capability built-in, although it only grabs specific folders (/storage/.kodi, /storage/.cache, /storage/.config) not all folders.

LybsterKodi · May 29, 2022 at 7:23 AM

OK, thanks.

I can clone my Linux Mint (Clonezilla) to a slightly smaller USB stick, and I can clone Windows to a smaller disk (Macrium) and in both cases the clone will run happily so I was hoping LibreElec would be the same.

Does the LibreElec backup backup any addons (eg TVHeadend)? If not I'll just create a disk image and store that.

**chewitt** · May 29, 2022 at 7:47 AM

Kodi add-ons are stored under /storage/.kodi so core TVH add-on/settings should be backed up.

LybsterKodi · May 29, 2022 at 2:44 PM

Thanks, my obvious misreading was that only the settings not the actual addons were saved.

ps I took your advice and bought a passively cooled case but Geekworm not Flirc