User:Talpa/Backup
The first 64 sectors of the eMMC and the waveform partition contains irreplaceable data unique to your PineNote and must be backed up.
Depending of your personal level of data hoarder you may want to backup more than this or even just everything (the large userdata partition is supposed to be able to be repopulated as empty space by Android)
In any case it is easier to restore/extract data from a backup than not having one if you need one.
Manually using rkdeveloptool
Dorian has some nice notes regarding the PineNote
Don't forget to install a patched U-Boo for reading beyond 32MB and to respect the 2GB limit/bug of the current rkdeveloptool as per his notes
Build rkdeveloptool:
git clone https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/quartz-bsp/rkdeveloptool.git cd rkdeveloptool mkdir build cd build cmake ..
Download mode Enter the download mode by placing the pen as pictured below. A magnet placed where the pen's cap is should also work (haven't tried). I guess the dot on the case also indicates the position of the sensor.
placing pen on the back
lsusb
should now recognize the PineNote as:
2207:350a Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company USB download gadget
List partitions:
> rkdeveloptool list-partitions # LBA start (sectors) LBA end (sectors) Size (bytes) Name 00 16384 24575 4194304 uboot 01 24576 32767 4194304 trust 02 32768 36863 2097152 waveform 03 36864 45055 4194304 misc 04 45056 53247 4194304 dtbo 05 53248 55295 1048576 vbmeta 06 55296 137215 41943040 boot 07 137216 145407 4194304 security 08 145408 407551 134217728 recovery 09 407552 1193983 402653184 backup 10 1193984 3291135 1073741824 cache 11 3291136 3323903 16777216 metadata 12 3323904 9697279 3263168512 super 13 9697280 9730047 16777216 logo 14 9730048 9861119 67108864 device 15 9861120 241827775 118766927872 userdata
See instructions on this artifact. It will instruct you on extracting the rootfs into an empty ext4 partition. This can be done from Linux or Android. Further instructions on building your own rootfs can be found here.
Automated backup using a script and rkdeveloptool
pinenote-backup is a python script for detecting the partitions and automating the backup of partitions or the whole disk.
It also requires a patched u-boot but automatically handles the 2GB limit by splitting up larger reads into smaller ones
Using the factory Android installation
TODO
Using a user installed Linux
A Linux installed to the cache partition should be able to easily backup everything over WiFi or to a USB stick/disk using dd.
However the user would need to backup the cache partition themself (if they want that).
And more importantly they would only be getting the backup after they started playing with the content of the eMMC.