Backing up a flash image?
 

I've spent quite a bit of time customizing my Nokia 770 to my liking. I've installed all the programs I need (including some with dpkg); I have rearranged the entire /etc/others-menu directory to reflect my most commonly used programs; I've added application icons for starting/stopping the SSH server and for enabling/disabling MMC swap.

With all this root tweaking, I'm bound to destroy something eventually. Are there any good ways of extracting the entire contents of the Nokia 770's internal flash into a file (ideally onto my PC over USB into a file that could be given to the flasher utility).

Something like the opposite of flasher, is what I'm looking for.

If there isn't, I'll have to settle for a dd or tar solution.

Anybody have any ideas for backing up the Nokia 770's entire internal flash?

Good point there...You know Acronis is like norton ghost but it's linux based....I wonder if anyone would get that working?

gnuite: that's one of the reasons I wrote this: allows me to create a copy of stuff I've changed in /etc (for example) and copy it back post-upgrade.

aflegg, that's a good idea, but (aside from the automatic CM bookkeeping) does it offer anything more than a tarball? e.g. if I *move* something (not just add something), will that move be backed up? If so, then that's an improvement over a tarball, but the holy grail would be to be able to maintain this backup between flash upgrades - is that possible with the rsync solution?

In that respect, I wonder if there's any solution better than a shell script. It looks like the application installer has a CLI interface (app-installe-tool install <file>), so a shell script solution could potentially work across flash versions (but would be a pain to develop).

If you move something on the device, and then do a pull you'll end up with two copies of the moved file, which on a push would result in the original being put back.

This could be fixed by adding an appropriate --delete option to the rsync command; however is tricky to get back.

However, if you mean can you move items around in /etc/others-menu and put that back, yes - with care.

Getting synchronisation right is hard: a minimum of two powerful computers with changes possible on either one with changes being kept in sync.

Arguably one solution would be to keep stuff you've changed in Subversion and then merge the changes back onto a reflashed image.

Cheers,

Andrew