Using a discimage to back-up

I’d like to back up my RISC OS data files to a cloud service e.g. Dropbox. I realize I will lose all the filetype information, so was wondering if creating a discimage of the media to be backed up using !Clonedisc would avoid the problem. Would I need to stay below the 4GB limit per image?

Not sure why the post has appeared twice! I don’t know how to delete the spare, but if anyone else does, feel free.

Not sure why the post has appeared twice! I don’t know how to delete the spare, but if anyone else does, feel free.

I don’t think they can be deleted by an ordinary user, but you could have just edited, as the originator, your duplicate post to say something like:

[ unwanted duplicate deleted ]

thus avoiding a third posting.

Which particular 4GB limit are you referring to, out of interest?

John

Post deletion: thanks for the advice.

4GB limit: AFAIK a single file is limited to 4GB in size: “FileCore 3.61 and later allow for the maximum size of any individual file to be 0xFFFFFFFF bytes (4GB minus 1), earlier versions were limited to 0×7FFFFFFF bytes (2GB minus 1).” (taken from Beginners’ FAQs on the ROOL site). I’m presuming a discimage counts as a single file?

A discimage is a singlefile. Save the Image direct to a zip – file also not work.
Storage memory is not a problem but time is ;-), so I copy my folder in a uncompressed zip and move this to my backup device.

I forget…
For compressed Images I use Linux and somthing like

Backup
sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 | bzip2 >/media/path/image.bz2
Restore
sudo bunzip2 -ck /media/path/image.bz2 | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0

Use your own path and devices!!!

If you use win, try USBit for compressed backuo/restore. Is better than Win32Imager.

4GB limit: AFAIK a single file is limited to 4GB in size:

Ah, that one which Steffen Huber got round for DVD images by splitting the image file under RISC OS.

Thanks.

John

Thanks to Raik for the advice about zipping. I’d tried this before and had problems completing the zipping of large amounts of data. Selecting ‘no compression’ definitely made the process more stable here (Pi 1B, 5.21 [12-Jan-15]). However, I find the created zips are mostly faulty: ‘Bad Archive’ errors when opening under RISC OS, and won’t open on the Windows side either. So I’ve given up on ‘cloud’ backup for the time being.

SparkFS takes a long time for bigger archiv. You can use it also in a command line mode. Maybe this is faster (never try).
You can also try zip and unzip . Both are faster but commandline only.