The above method requires two Max2Play installations, i.e., Max2Play set up on two SD cards – a main SD card which needs backing up and which we cannot boot from if we want to save a backup of that main SD card, the other SD card with Max2Play and Imageburner addon which we’ve booted from to be able to save the main SD card. This means that the Raspberry Pi running Max2Play needs to be shut down, the main SD card removed, the Max2Play with Imageburner addon inserted and booted from and then the main SD card backed up; then Raspberry Pi rebooted from the main SD card again after the backup is completed. A tedious process which involves shutting down the running Raspberry Pi and swapping SD cards.
Instead, if Max2Play can provide a facility whereby the running main SD card can be backed up to a network share, that would be awesome (it can pause/stop all running services if needed for backup stability and resume/start the services which were stopped again after the backup is complete!). Restoration then simply should be a matter of expanding the stored archive onto a new SD card using standard (un)archiving utilities available on most operating systems.
Please, Max2Play, provide this facility – users spend a lot of time configuring their installations and it would be very useful to be able to do a 1-click backup/restore. If this can be directly supported via the Imageburner plugin, even better (Imageburner will need two enhancements for this to happen: a) allow running system to be backed up b) network shares as backup targets).
I’m visualising the capability to utilise my NAS as backup target for all my Max2Play devices as a use-case of the above if implemented/made available…if this is done, I’ll install Max2Play on all my Raspberry Pi devices I currently use as media centres.
