Jetson/Clone

Using the L4T tools, it is possible to back up and restore APP partition on Jetson platform eMMC which contains the Ubuntu file system.

The Jetson platform must be connected to Host PC over USB and entered into recovery mode.

Cloning the Image
cd into the directory containing the L4T installation package on the host PC. The command below will save the platform's APP partition image to the specified file on the host.

$ sudo ./flash.sh -r -k APP -G backup.img mmcblk0p1

Where specifies the type of the target device: • For Jetson AGX Xavier: jetson-xavier • For Jetson TX2: jetson-tx2 • For Jetson TX1: jetson-tx1 • For Jetson Nano eMMC module: jetson-nano-emmc

In this case, we call the file backup.img, so the same flash.sh script can be re-used to format and flash other Jetson platforms of the same type with the image.

This command actually creates two image files: backup.img and backup.img.raw. backup.img.raw contains raw data read from the target's APP partition, it has exactly the same size as APP partition. backup.img is a sparsed image, it has a much smaller size and can speed up the restoring step.

Copy the backup image to flashing directory
copy the .raw file which contains complete image from source device. $ sudo cp backup.img bootloader/system.img

Restoring the Image
The recommended way to restore multiple units with different serial numbers is to save the image above as "system.img" and use the head L4T flashing script, flash.sh, with the -r option (to reuse your backed-up system.img without rebuilding the vanilla image from scratch):

$ sudo ./flash.sh -r -k APP mmcblk0p1

Where specifies the type of the target device: • For Jetson AGX Xavier: jetson-xavier • For Jetson TX2: jetson-tx2 • For Jetson TX1: jetson-tx1 • For Jetson Nano eMMC module: jetson-nano-emmc

Alternative Method For Cloning
There is also another method to backup APP partition, if Cloning fails with L4T tool, please try this method. This method is written for Jetson AGX Xavier but it can apply to other platforms.