[GUIDE] Quick & Dirty Volumio Data/Configuration Backup (with 'tar')

Reflashing to a new version of Volumio, or clearing the user data can be a little frustrating, especially if you have lots of playlists or web radio stations etc. It’s actually quite simple to save your data, and restore it after a new flash, but it occurred to me that possibly some people were unfamiliar with the archiving program ‘tar.’

The following is NOT official, and is carried out entirely at your own risk.

It is possible, even likely, that a future Volumio update will change the way it’s configuration is saved, and in this case this method may not work. At the worst, you may need to reflash your card again, and configure it the original way through the UI.

  1. Start a terminal session (either through ssh) or directly with a keyboard and monitor.

  2. Type the following at the command prompt:

sudo tar -zcvf volumio_data.tgz /data

which will produce a compressed file ‘volumio_data.tgz’ of your configuration data.

  1. Copy your backup file ‘volumio_data.tgz’ to your destination of choice using one of the following options:
  • transfer the file to your host PC via putty if using Windows;
  • use ‘scp’ to directly transfer the file to your host device if you are using Linux or a Mac;
  • copy the file to ‘/mnt/INTERNAL’ and access it as a Samba share;
  • copy the file to ‘/mnt/USB’ if you have an attached USB flash drive.
  1. Restore your data by copying your data file back onto a newly flashed device, and running:
sudo tar -zxvf volumio_data.tgz -C /
  1. You will still need to reinstall your plugins, but their settings should be intact.

  2. You may need to switch the i2s toggle off in ‘Playback Options’ and save, before turning it on again. This should force Volumio to write your DAC information to the /boot/config.txt file.

It’s pretty straighforward to encapulate the above into a script, which makes life even easier. You could also filter what you back up, so that for example you only backed up playlists, radio streams & custom backgrounds … this backup could then be restored on any Volumio device you may have, irrespective of DAC type.

I’m sure that we would all like an official save/restore data function in Volumio … even a community written plugin :wink: … but, in the meantime, the above method saves me lots of time (and patience) on my multiple image reflashes.

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Hi chisims1,

I tried your way to backup and it worked pretty well.

So far I’ve done that using a Banana Pi (with Raspbian) and a card reader to backup and restore volumio data.

Thanks a lot for sharing this.

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I tried a backup with clonezilla, but the data partition failed. Is there really no way to make an image backup of all 3 partitions including data?

You can store the entire SD card as an image using a program like :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/?source=top3_dlp_t5
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dotnetdiskimager/?source=directory

thank you Pirx, will try it!

Thank you, worked first time for me. You can use it to transfer whole folders of music over to the volumio Raspberry Pi. If your folder contains spaces in its pathname, have a look at this: macos - scp copy has error "ambiguous target" - Super User

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