How do we replicate an install image of a Pi from one SD card to another? (Travelling to PNG and it has taken me about 2 days to setup 1 X Pi with all the necessary content - and can’t spend days doing the same for other Pis)
The install guide makes this comment:
“Replication will be described in future guides.”
I have not been able to find these instructions - assuming the guides are not written as yet.
Many thanks for your support.
I am assuming the steps are:
deprovision kolibri: “kolibri manage deprovision”
Create an image of the SD card: eg using BalenaEtcher for windows
Restore that image to a new SD card
Boot from that SD card on a new Pi provision the image (kolibri manage provisiondevice) (and update the firmware)
I don’t know BalenaEtcher, but if this tool suits your setup, then go for it It can be faster to clone SD card images on a laptop than on the Raspberry Pi due to its limited I/O speed.
I think that your outline sounds correct. But don’t mind asking if it is causing problems or new questions!
In general this will work, but there are a couple of gotchas. The first is that on windows as the sd card is being written there will be more than one partition created and windows will pop up complaints about needing to format them, which can break the process. My current favorite to solve this is https://github.com/filipxsikora/dotnet-disk-imager if you have to use windows.
The other problem is that unless the card you plan to copy to is from the same manufacturer and of the same size, small discrepancies in the reported size can make the write fail. To solve this problem I use the scripts in https://github.com/iiab/iiab-factory/tree/master/box/rpi that shrink the file system as part of the capture of the image, but these only run on linux.
It can be faster to clone SD card images on a laptop than on the Raspberry Pi due to its limited I/O speed.