How to clone/backup master SSD

[bkasi]

Hello everyone,
I currently have a 500GB M2 SSD which has been flashed using the SDK Manager (Jetpack v5.0.2). Such SSD is therefore used to boot my Jetson Xavier NX, it contains all NVIDIA drivers (also installed with the SDK Manager) and additional Linux packages.

Now, I would like to have other SSDs (same model, same size) configured in the exact same way so I would need to get an image file from of my master SSD which I can then use to set up the other SSDs. I don’t want to copy the whole 500GB though, ideally I would just copy the part that is used while preserving the original partitions. This is my partition table:

Disk /dev/sda: 465,78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: SSD 980 500GB   
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt

Device      Start      End  Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1  764752 50384895 49620144 23,7G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda2      40   131111   131072   64M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda3  131112   262183   131072   64M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda4  262184   263079      896  448K Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda5  263080   263975      896  448K Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda6  263976   427815   163840   80M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda7  427816   428839     1024  512K Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda8  428840   633639   204800  100M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda9  633640   764711   131072   64M EFI System
/dev/sda10 764712   764747       36   18K Microsoft basic data

Is there a way to do that? Is there an NVIDIA script which can be used specifically for this purpose? I found the ~/nvidia/nvidia_sdk/JetPack_5.0.2_Linux_JETSON_XAVIER_NX_TARGETS/Linux_for_Tegra/tools/backup_restore/l4t_backup_restore.sh script but this only seems to clone the eMMC, not the SSD.

[linuxdev]

The backup/restore tends to center only the o/s partition (“APP” or rootfs). I don’t see any Linux partitions there. Is the rootfs on this? What do you see from:
lsblk -f

A tool like rsync can be used to back up partitions with format, although it would not copy any kind of UUID or PUID, and would not create a partition. If you go to a tool like dd, then you get a bit-for-bit exact copy of either a partition or an entire disk.

This is difficult because you will still have to create an empty partition (with formatting) if you want to use rsync. If you use a tool like dd, then this can create a partition as well, but you are copying every last byte of the given partition. If the one partition is 400 GB, then you copy 400 GB (not far from the 500 GB you don’t want to copy).

Also, when working with a Jetson, you would still need to flash the Jetson. All of the content which is equivalent to a BIOS, plus boot content, still goes on the Jetson. Then a “pointer” to the start of boot content is installed via that flash. External devices are easy to set up (though time consuming and using a lot of disk space), but it won’t prevent the need to flash the actual Jetson (the flash would be shorter though since it doesn’t need more than a “/boot” in most cases when using external content).