Saving Mount Settings after Upgrade

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Good morning all.

After successfully installing OpenWrt 18.06.0 on my Archer C7 V2, I added a portable hard drive and implemented Samba to successfully use it as a media drive.

However, after upgrading to 18.06.1, all of my work for mounting the drive disappeared. I downloaded the sysupgrade file for 18.06.1 (not the full version), backed up my configuration and then performed the firmware update using the sysupgrade file (with "keep settings" checked). After the upgrade was done, I could no longer access my media drive. I no longer had a menu option for "mount points" under the System menu or a menu for Network Shares.

After doing some analysis, I discovered that a lot of the files needed to perform the mount were gone (e.g. a lot of kmod files, ntfs-3g and associated files, kmod-usb-storage-uas, etc.). After reinstalling these files and resetting my mount points, I was able to get the drive working again.

My question is this: what can I do to back up these files and/or make sure future upgrades don't cause this problem again?

Thank you in advance.

2

As a starting point, you should know mounting a device needs kernel modules and packages to identify the device. If the router does not know whether an external usb device is available or not, then it cannot mount it, obviously.
The best thing would be to create a custom firmware for your router adding necessary packages to identify and mount the drive at boot. The firmware created by Openwrt build system only includes a handful of packages which may not work for your use case.

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3

Those are not "files" but packages. It is completely normal that you have to re-install the packages you have installed after flashing your device, because the sysupgrade simply doesn't contain your specific user-installed packages.

Search the forum, there are some topics regarding automatic re-installation of user-installed packages after a sysupgrade.

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