The PinePhone system can be installed either on the phone’s internal storage (eMMC) or on an SD card.
After booting from an SD card, both the system and user data are stored on that SD card. This means you can make a “full device backup” to a computer, similar to Apple’s iTunes or Android’s TWRP.
With this trick, you can also move a system installed on an SD card to eMMC without much drama.
Please read PinePhone OS installation guide first to understand the process.
This article explains how to use a computer to back up a PinePhone system and how to restore it.
The steps below focus on a Linux computer. On Windows, use software such as Win32DiskImager to create the image file.
1. How to back up the system and data on an SD card#
- Insert the SD card into the computer and use
lsblkto check whether the system mounted it automatically. If it did, unmount it, for example:
sudo umount /media/ivon/MySD- After unmounting, note the SD card path, such as
/dev/sdb. Use theddcommand to copy all files from the SD card to the computer and save them as a system image file.
sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=~/Desktop/Backup.img bs=100M status=progress conv=fsync- Since the system image size will equal the SD card capacity, you can use gzip compression before saving it.
sudo dd if=/dev/sdc bs=100M status=progress | gzip -c > ~/Desktop/Backup.img.gz2. How to restore the system to an SD card#
Insert the SD card into the computer and format the SD card (optional).
Unmount it.
sudo umount /media/ivon/MySD- Write the backup image to the SD card.
sudo dd if=~/Desktop/Backup.img of=/dev/sdc bs=100M status=progress conv=fsync3. How to back up and restore the system and data on the phone’s eMMC#
Install Tow-Boot so the phone’s eMMC appears as an SD card when connected to a computer. Then follow steps 1 and 2 above to back up or restore the system.
