Do You Backup Your Sd Cards?

[doc5avage]

Sometime ago, my 4gb non-sdhc card died. I lost countless hours of work. I had built a quite a homebrew and emulation collection. Complete with icons, dosbox configs, gmenu2x launchers for doom wads, custom this custom that.

Since that fateful day, I backup. If I'm going to make a change to anything on my card, I do it on an external hard disk which is an exact replica of my main SD Card. Then I simply plug my sd card in, launch Unison and sync away.

I want to recommend this method to others as it seems faultless now (Unless SD card and ext drive dies).

Does anyone have any other methods, better or worse, or works for you?

Cheers

 

[Megaboz]

I do something very similar. I have a directory for my GP2X card backups (subdivided into directories for each card). Once the SD card is mounted, I just have an rsync script do its magic to sync card to its directory.

 

[fishybawb]

I don't do anything fancy like sync-ing, just copy the contents over to a folder on my laptop's backup partition every once in a while

 

[Alex.]

I backup my card every 3 or 4 months too, especially after I add lots of new games. However, I don't bother with anything more than a simple drag and drop to my desktop, which I suppose is hassle enough for 1.5GB of data sent over a USB 1.1 connection It's not very often that the card gets corrupted, but it happens, so this proved to be useful at least a couple of times.

 

[plopperz]

I only back up the stuff I really like or is hard to find. I wouldn't have room on my Hard Drive for my whole SD card (Damn 6 gig HD <_< )

 

[Parkydr]

In bash type:

mount /media/reader3
tar cf sd.tar /media/reader3

 

[EvilDragon]

Would use RSync if I was running under Linux.
With Windows, I bought AllwaySync, which syncs all my stuff from my Laptop as soon as I change it to a network drive.
When I insert the SD Card, it checks automatically for changes and syncs it on my network server.
That's pretty fast, as mostly only savestates change

 

[Lodis]

Under Windows XP I use Drive Snapshot which can backup about 1GB per minute to a compressed image. 30 days fully functional free trial too.

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

 

[bomberman]

I use FolderClone in Windows. Backs up savestates and bram real quick. I just have to remember to back up by date AND size since the GP2X timestamp isn't recognized by Windoze (the 1980 date thing).

 

[dsraa]

I usually just do folder copy of all my saves, configs, and non-rom stuff, since I have full rom collections on dvds, every few months.


So that recent mishap with my sd card becoming cracked, of course made me do a back-up so I'd have a most recent copy of stuff for when I finally buy a new card, and do the firmware update to accept sdhc format.


DSR

 

[Kramy]

I just drag the contents over to a folder, and 7-zip that. Plenty compressed, so I don't waste too much HDD space.

I have a lame 512MB SD card. It only takes ~20 secs to backup by card reader(it isn't full yet), but part of it died, so now it has a 480MB capacity...

 

[Sphinxter]

When ever I install something hot I'll do a
$ tar cvfj /tmp/sd1234 .bz2 /mnt/sd

 

[tuXXX]

I've done my script tonight, using rsync.

I have an "image" directory on my computer with the same directory tree than the one on my GP2X, when I want to do some modification, I do it there and run the script to update the GP2X.
The command to sync to the GP2X looks something like that:
CODE
rsync -rv8hP --stats --max-size=50M --delete --modify-window=1 --copy-links "$FROM"/* "$TO"

(with $FROM my local folder and $TO the GP2X's mount dir)
I have to find a way to not delete more-than-50MB files, but instead keep them as-this (or tell rsync to understand symbolic links, I don't want to copy CD ISOs everywhere ).
Previously I did this folder-by-folder, and used the "-a", wich caused rsync to overwrite files over and over (not really good, SD cards are flash-based!).

Now sync'ing files is a fast operation, copying only modified files and don't stress the SD card.

 

[Squidge]

tar cf sd.tar /media/reader3

What, no z or bz2?

For backups, I use Total Commander whenever I can be bothered , shows you whats changed on both dirs and lets you decide exactly what to copy where.

 

[Gadget]

Yes, I use my own backup utility I wrote ages ago:-

http://www.c5software.co.uk/Gadget/SDImageUtility.zip

The above utility copies the SD card in entirety, ie. FATS, partition, raw binary.

I also take file copies as well just incase.

EDIT: If you use this utility, backup your card file by file to you hard drive first just until you are familiar with it. 'Read' will backup your card to file. 'Write' will overwrite your card with the image you selected.

It's a bit slow on my 1Gb card but I think part of my problem is the card read speed.

 

[Parkydr]

tar cf sd.tar /media/reader3

What, no z or bz2?



I only use a 1GB card.

 

[ledow]

Argh, backups are for wimps.

I don't bother to back up configs or saves because I don't see the point - I completed all the interesting games years ago and the rest of the games are five-minute mess-abouts to me. That's why I love the GP2X - it's impossible to be bored with a GP2X and a large enough SD card. I still haven't managed to play 1% of the games I have for it.

Although, I would be a little sad if I lost the high-scores on a couple of games, it's really not worth the effort to back up the card (although the actual *programs*, *source*, *ROM's* etc. are all backed up several times on different computers).

I just keep a "GP2X" directory on my computer, which is where I sling anything related to it, and in there I unpack the games into unique directories. If the SD card fails, it's just a matter of dragging and dropping the games back over to a new SD card. I'd be more inconvenienced having to wait for a new SD card to arrive than anything else.

Having said that, I'm finding SuperTux a pain to back up - my GP2X has it in NAND, where it works fine, but copying it bit-for-bit to the SD card seems to make it work only a small percentage of the time. And the only other version I can find on the archive seems to be much older and a different port. The wife would go spare if I lost her SuperTux...

But backing up projects of my own - that's a million times more important. When I change source code, it ends up in a dozen different places. And I have several backups of the PayBack installer that I paid good money for.

 

[doc5avage]

Call me a wimp, but I am sick to death of losing my Chrono trigger save. I don't know how many times I have started that game, stopped for a while, then lost it. SIGH.

Oh well, with my new method, I'm sure losing a save game, or config file is a thing of the past.

Just a quick plug for Unison too. It is open source, cross platform and can sync using many transfer methods. (Local file copy, rsync, ssh to name a few). I highly recommend it, because if you have big cards, it will do one massive sync, then subsequent syncs will be small.

Also, you can configure to ignore certain filetypes or directories if you want it to only backup the save states and whatnot.

 

[kevcal]

linux:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=gp2x_sd1.ddi
gzip sdcard_1.ddi

 

[doc5avage]

linux:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=gp2x_sd1.ddi
gzip sdcard_1.ddi

I can save you a step on that:
dd if=/dev/sdb | tar jcf sdcard_1.dd.bz2