Restore backup on intial boot - should I user automatic software install or not?

General Discussion
1

Hello,

I have a question about how to restore my broken DietPi-system.

Situation:

  • Odroid HC4 (arm64 SBC) running DietPi OS on SD-card
  • attached external HDD, containing dietpi_userdata
  • installed software: Nextcloud, Jellyfin (+ small other stuff)

DietPi, all installed software and APT-packages were up-to-date. The system worked very fine for 2½ years.
Two days ago it crashed. I rebooted the system attached on tv and see lots of errors, among a few lines with “I/O error, dev mmcblk0 …”. I suspect the SD-card is end-of-live…

I want to re-install my system on a new SD-card. What is the best way to do this? I installed DietPi on a new card and was able to boot my system without errors. So, it looks there is no hardware failure on the board itself. I could also see that my external HDD containing dietpi_userdata is also working well. Using a separate Linux laptop, I could mount the ‘broken’ SD-card and see that there are two recent dietpi_backup’s on it.

According to the documentation it is possible to edit dietpi.txt file on a new SD-image prior to initially boot the system. Do I only need to activate a restore using “AUTO_SETUP_BACKUP_RESTORE=1”? What about “AUTO_SETUP_INSTALL_SOFTWARE_ID=??” or other settings like global password, hostname etc.
Are all such settings restored using a succesful dietpi-restore? Or should I configure them as well in dietpi.txt?

Thanks al lot for clarification!

Frank

2

All of your settings and aoftware are pulled from the backup, it is a full system backup.
But the
AUTO_SETUP_BACKUP_RESTORE option is only applied on the very first boot, before the initial setup. You would now need to trigger the restore via dietpi-backup

3

Thanks for responding so quickly.
I was unclear. I wil start with a new fresh burnt image anyway, since that SD-card is the only device that I can write the dietpi-backup-folder to. So that must be done when it is not in a running system. You explained it well. Thanks