I need a fresh N900 to do a few experiments on, but I'm unwilling to let go of my existing Maemo install, which I customized extensively before I discontinued its use and would never be able to restore to current status again from memory. Why? Nostalgia, I suppose, as well as keeping some old apps that I can't find in the repos anymore, or maybe I sideloaded them - who can remember.

Ideally I'd like to do a full clone from USB and store the result as a massive compressed image file, which I could then reflash again to the N900 in case of need, replacing the existing eMMC content.

Is this feasible? If not, is there some procedure approaching this?

Edit: I'm reading up while I wait for answers and I may have explained this incorrectly. By "eMMC" I meant "entire content of the flash drive in the phone".

Hi,

I think you are looking for BackupMenu...

jm

Yes, BackupMenu can create rootfs.tar and optfs.tar and restore them.

From its interface (which you can enter right after boot) you can then switch your N900 to a USB mass storage mode and copy all of your MyDocs, where the two archives above can be stored.

Thanks, it seems that should do. It isn't *exactly* what I wanted, but it appears to offer similar functionality with a lot less hassle, so yay!

It has saved me lots of times. And, just today I restored my then-primary N900 which I messed up before Christmas, and it worked flawlessly.

The uncompressed tar of my ubi0:rootfs was 341 MB and optfs (home and opt) was 1.2 GB. It took more than 10 minutes but I was relieved at the end :-)

Backupmenu is best choice.
Not exactly what you were looking for, but ...

You may insert a 32GB SD card and just store your Backupmenu backups of /rootfs and /optfs on SD.
And then do a simple 'dd /if=/home/user/MyDocs /of=/media/mmc/eMMC.img' with some more parameters.
Not like USB but as convenient as

p.s.: with N9 and ubiboot your preferred way via USB is possible. On N900 there is rescueImage but I really do not know if all partitions are exported to USB, so it would be possible to dd them (never heard/read/did, but ...).