Imaging an SD Card nano

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
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1

Is there a way to make an image of the MicroSD card that I’m using for my Nano’s OS install, that only contains the used space?

I’ve been unable to figure out how to do the above and I would greatly appreciate information or instructions on how to do so.

Thanks in advance.

3

What does “that only contains the used space” mean ? Not quite sure here…

4

Thanks for the reply. I’ll give you an example:

  • The MicroSD card I’m using is 128GB.
  • The OS install uses far less space than that.
  • When making an image of the card, it would be much more helpful to be able to only capture the space used for the files instead of an entire sector by sector copy of the whole 128GB, as that results in a massive file.
  • When dealing with solid state drives or hard drives, I have the tools at my disposal to easily handle creating an intelligent copy, but none of them are currently able to do so with a MicroSD card. One example of such a program is Macrium Reflect 7. Version 8 is reported to be able to do work with MicroSD cards in the capacity I would hope to use it, but It doesn’t look like that version has been released.
  • I’m fine to try whatever tool fits the job, whether it works with Linux or Windows, and it doesn’t matter if it’s got a GUI or is used from the shell.
5

There are pieces of what you want available, but probably not in a way which is useful to you.

Jetsons are able to be flashed with either a “sparse” image (what you describe you want), or else via the “raw” image (the full image, bit-for-bit). However, this is only for the rootfs, and for flashing, not for running live. The sparse image is such that I don’t think there are any open source tools which will work with it…the recovery mode Jetson is able to though. Someone else may have found a way to convert the sparse into raw, but I don’t know of it. Sparse images would be useful for storing in less space on the host PC, and for flashing, but not for direct restore of an APP partition on a Jetson SD card model.

If you are simply creating your own partitions based on a reference copy, then use something like rsync to create a directory filled with just the content (rsync includes metadata such as permissions, and works with device special files and special cases). That directory of rsync copied content can easily be turned into a partition of whatever size you want (for a Jetson to use it you’d need the partition size to be an integral multiple of either 1024 twice or 1024 three times).

I doubt you will find any useful tools to do this under Windows since we are talking about preserving file types and permissions which cannot exist on NTFS or VFAT.

If you give a specific example of what kind of work flow procedure you want (assuming from Linux), then some example rsync commands can be given.

6

You mean similar issue as this one?