Beginner help

Hi,
I ran into a network problem and need general help/tips:
I’ve startet with the jetson nano and I’m pretty new to linux. Installed VSCode and wlan and was fighting package/dependency hell to get some example running (ZWI ASI Camera, not important). When the wlan got unstable I switch to ethernet, only to discover that “docker” (which I have no use for) had decided to completely nuke my network adapter settings. I could not get it running again and I’m now reflashing the image.
Now the questions:
What is the recomendet workflow to prevent that some packages just nuke all your work? Can I restrict access to system function like network config?
Can I backup my system over usb or do I use a sdcard-reader and create an image?

Thanks for you help!
Matthias

It is often said that there is no substitute for backup. Is this the dev kit running on SD card? If so, then save two copies of the SD card. It is trivial to do this so long as you have the disk space available, e.g., on an external drive or a Linux PC (backing up with a tool like dd is quite easy, but has a size equal to the entire SD card).

I want to mention something about dev kits before going into more detail: The dev kit has both the SD card, plus onboard QSPI memory. The QSPI contains boot content, and on rare occasion this changes depending on release version. Boot only works if the SD card content is a compatible release versus the QSPI release. In some cases, if the two releases differ, then it is possible the attempt to boot could modify the SD card (and if this is your only backup, then you could recover some data from this, but boot wouldn’t work on that backup). Flashing is how you change the QSPI, and if you know your backup is from that release, then there isn’t really any risk to booting from the backup. Even so, it is best if you save an image on your Linux PC, and then copy it to an SD card whenever the backup is needed.

On any Linux system, if you have a lot of spare disk space (use “df -H” to get an idea of each partition’s space available), and as an example, if the SD card being backed up is “/dev/sdb”, then you’d make sure the SD card is not mounted, followed by something like this to create an image:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup.img
…and this might back up a bit faster:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup.img bs=1MiB

If you have a blank SD card in your PC (also example using “/dev/sdb”, but adjust for your case), then copying the backup to the new/empty SD would go something like this:
sudo dd if=backup.img of=/dev/sdb

However, when you do have problems, you really need to post the serial console boot log. Not doing so implies whatever went wrong remains a mystery and might recur. When something goes wrong make sure you have that serial console boot log.

Additionally, if it is network failure, then you want to provide the output of these:

ifconfig
iwconfig
route

Thank you very much qlinuxdev. Only saving my code and not a sd backup was kinda foolish I guess.

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