Today I tested … Jumpdrive and doing a reliable backup
TLDR: Nice one, @dos. Worked like a treat.
As with updating the USB-C PD controller firmware, this is a little untidy because I am using Ubuntu. Now multiply that untidiness by 10. Ubuntu certainly doesn’t come with the necessary toolchain packages installed and nor is there a definitive list of what needs to be installed. So there is an element of trial and error. If anyone else wants to do this, I suggest replying here for more info.
This is a multi-hour odyssey (basically 5 hours). It involves downloading around half a gigabyte of stuff - and then compiling a lot of stuff. If you don’t have a fourth-world internet connection and if you have a faster computer, you may do a lot better than 5 hours. Of course all of this is one-off pain.
Once it is all built … Jumpdrive boots in an embarrassingly short amount of time, perhaps a second or two. So fight the toolchain for 5 hours and then two seconds later your phone is running Jumpdrive.
As before, the one line shell script to load Jumpdrive into the Librem 5 requires root access. (sudo ...
)
With Jumpdrive booted on the phone, on my computer sda
was the eMMC drive and sdb
was the uSD card. YMMV.
Warning: Ubuntu automounts both drives and in the case of the eMMC drive both partitions. So if you intend to backup the eMMC drive then make sure that you umount
it (sda1
and sda2
) before starting the backup.
I chose to do the backup by piping dd
through gzip
. For me that meant that I could backup the 31 GB eMMC drive in 9 minutes at 58 MB/s producing a 2.9 GB file. That is fast enough to encourage backups actually to be done. No doubt as I put more ‘stuff’ on the phone, it will take longer and produce a larger file.
I consider a reliable backup to be essential. I would not put information on a computer that I couldn’t reliably backup.
Warning … off the top of my head: gunzip --list
malfunctions (presents incorrect information) when the original file exceeds 4 GB (as it does here). That can be safely ignored.
It looked to me (big disclaimers apply) that Jumpdrive contains most of an entire Linux kernel. As a consequence, it is possible to telnet in to the Librem 5 and look around and do stuff. This could be quite useful if your Linux install on the eMMC drive is broken but not so broken that you just want to restore from backup.
For example, if you forget the password for the purism
account and haven’t created another account, you could fix the password. Of course you could also do that directly on the main computer since it can mount the eMMC drive, and assuming that your main computer is running Linux.