Create full image backup of R7800

Hello,

I have configured my Netgear R7800 for most of what i want. Ofcourse I backupped my configuration with the administration tool in Luci.
But is it also possible to make a full image of my router in case something goes wrong i can flash that image on it so most of my settings are saved?

Thank you very kindly.

Greetings tom

You cannot make a full image of a running system (without getting corrupted data). That what you could do is connecting via serial console to the device, booting a initramfs image into RAM (if supported by your device' bootloader) and connecting via ssh in order to make a "dd" image of all partitions. Either into RAM to copy it away via scp or directly to an USB drive (if your device has an USB port).
Beside that. The easiest way would be copying all files located in /etc (the location where config files usually stored on a Linux system) to an USB drive or via scp/ssh.

thank you.

grt tom

I don't own the device but from what I read on wikidevi the R7800 uses a Nand flash. I believe due to ECC data being on the flash chip you cannot use dd for backup (or end up with the ECC data as well).

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/flash

The tool you want to use in nanddump. If you are compiling the initramfs yourself you can include luci with it and just use the web browser to get a dump of each partitions (the way they are defined in the DTS file). You can then easily use soemthing like cat to put them together (if that's what you want really).

#cat mtd1.bin+mtd2.bin+mtd3.bin...etc > fullflash.bin

If you need to restore it will be easier to just use the same partition images and use mtd as it handles Nand as well

#mtd write mtd3.bin factory

You use the name of the partition as defined in /proc/mtd

My advice is to use the normal openwrt image and backup from luci - system - backup - Save mtdblock contents and just save all the partitions except the firmware one. The firmware one is the one being flashed anyway everytime you upgrade the device so there is no need really to back that one up.

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