hello,
I am going thru the process of an L5 re-flash dry run just to familiarize myself with the process in the event I need to do this. Trying to educate myself.
My question is:
Would I be-able to restore an L5 image after re-flash which was created prior in Gnome disks and stored on a sd card?
Which would be better a Gnome disk image or deja dup file back up for restoration purposes?
You mention Gnome disks and deja dup, as two methods, I don’t know about those (maybe they are good methods) but I will mention another way, one that I have used: there is a tool called Jumpdrive that lets you connect a laptop to a Librem 5, then the disk inside the Librem 5 gets exposed in a similar way as a USB stick, you can copy all the data (for a backup like you wanted) or you can go in and change things to rescue yourself in case you messed things up so that it will not boot.
Jumpdrive is mentioned here, with some links to how to install it and so on:
In my case, what I did was to first copy out all the data from my Librem 5 using Jumpdrive, then reflash the phone, then I restored the contents of certain directories (~/.local and ~/.config and ~/.mms and ~/.purple) to avoid having to configure things over again.
Of course, beware that restoring those directories might reintroduce the problems you had that motivated the reflash in the first place, so careful with that, don’t restore too much.
Anyway, returning to your goal of restoring everything, I think it should be possible to use Jumpdrive to copy back the whole disk contents, both partitions, from a backup created via Jumpdrive earlier. Then I think the phone should be back in exactly the same state as before the reflash because what the reflash is doing is to copy things to the disk. Copy the all old stuff back, and you have restored everything the reflash did. I think. If this is not right I hope someone will correct me.
It is possible that Gnome disks and/or deja dup would make it easier to do what you want, I just don’t know about those (yet).
I do not know: I have never used GNOME Disks for restoration purposes.
I do not know: I place important files on my microSD card manually; remove it during the reflashing process as a reminder to what I am doing; then only reinsert it when I have fully reconfigured everything on the device.
Whenever I reflash my Librem 5 USA, I always use this set of steps below.
Further off-topic tip: If you are using the encrypted variant and you want to re-encrypt before flashing then you have to use that option i.e. download separately, re-encrypt on host, then flash.
Using Jumpdrive and following the instructions for use I was able to access the phone flawlessly. But I guess being an old man that I am was getting errors trying to connect because I was not fast enough with my dexterity to connect the phone to the USB while holding the power and volume up button…but after some practice and patience was able to connect the phone.
BTW I was abled to use a regular amazon ordered USBA to USBC connector 36" in length with no problem.
Next up I created a full disk image using GNOME Disk and stored it to the desktop on my L13.
After completion of the image I rebooted the phone to see if it was rebootable and it was.
I used Jumpdrive again and aceessed the disk on the phone and began to restore the image that I created…about midway through the restoration I picked up the phone and must have disturbed the image restoration by accidentally bumping the USBC connection on the phone because I got an error that the image restoration failed.
I then powered down the phone and booted up again and got through the LUKS password entry but could not get to the lock screen and the error was a white screen sayin to try again…which I did and failed.
Then I used Jumpdrive again and began the restoration of the image once more without any disturbances of the host computer or the phone and successfully restored the Image that I made with Gnome disk. I disconnected the phone and booted it up with no problems and is back to normal with all settings files…etc…
so I suppose an occasional back up of the phone disk via Jumpdrive and Gnome disk would be good for restoring the image and may negate the necessity of having to reflash the phone and start from scratch…IDK.
This is very useful for my needs hopefully someone else will find it useful also. I added a few photos.
Time…30 mins to create and 30 mins to restore
New…Was able to flash another L5 spare(wifey dont like it) with an image created as above from my L5. Now I got twins!
