How to make backup of KiwiSDR software incl. individual labels

UlliUlli
edited February 2017 in KiwiSDR Discussion
Hello everybody,
I have setup a KiwiSDR at a remote site (1.5 hour drive from home) sometimes in October 2016. In the meantime many software upgrades were done automatically. While I started with software version 1.2 originally from 10th of August 2016, we are now...... congrats for that development effort!

But:
Unfortunately at my remote place there is now some heavy construction work in the close neighborhood and to modify the power network several time the power failed !
As a result the up-to-date software was damaged. Therefore I tried to install from the emergency Micro-SD card the very old original Version 1.2 from August, 10th.... Starting up that software causes automatically check via Network, if there is a new software..... of coarse it is.... but I must admit, upgrading from 1.2 to the current version will not work.... after 2 days... still no upgrade finally finished...

So - I figured out, that I have to manually download the software as compressed Img file and write a new emergency Micro-SD card  (in face Micro SDHC, because old small MicroSD cards are locally not anymore available.... I hope it works on Beaglebone!)
In a few days, I can try, if it is possible to install the current imagefile from the manual download from kiwiSDR.com ...
Hopefully it works, because the delivered MicroSD emergency card with the old software 1.2 is useless - no upgrade possible on newest version !

The big problem is:  All manually DX-Tags (station names, etc...) are completly lost!
How can I prevent this loss for the future - how can I make complete backups for the KiwiSDR software from time-to-time to safe both: a shorter upgrade path (which will work) incl. all my individual DX-tags/station names...

Or should I better forget about to input manually individual station names, until we have a new structure, so we can import/export CSV files such as the webSDR guys...?
Any advice for Software Backup is very much appreciated !

Regards,
Ulli, ON5KQ

Comments

  • jksjks
    edited February 2017
    Hi Ulli,

    I'm surprised your Kiwi software became damaged as a result of a power failure. It's possible of course. I think only one time I've had a Beagle become un-bootable after a power fail. And I am lazy and "pull the plug" quite often.

    I will double check, but there should be nothing wrong with the original v1.2 delivered on the SD shipped with the earliest Kiwis upgrading straight to v1.49

    The tags are stored on the Beagle in the file /root/kiwi.config/dx.json You could just copy that file across the network using e.g. the "scp" command on Linux or equivalent on Windows (i.e. "scp root@kiwisdr.local:/root/kiwi.config/dx.json .) But not everyone has experience with these kinds of things.

    Don't perform the following step if there active user connections to your Kiwi. Go to the control tab of the admin panel and select "no" for "enable user connections?". Then wait for people to leave by checking the status tab, or use the "Kick" button to forcibly disconnect them. Be sure to re-enable user connections once the backup has finished.

    You can also write a complete image of the Beagle to an SD/SDHC card by using the same process the factory does to make them. Go to the page kiwisdr.local:8073/mfg Obviously adjust the hostname and port number for your local Kiwi. Use the cyan-colored button marked "click to write micro SD-card". It will take around 4 minutes. Be certain to remove the card as soon as you're done. If you leave it in, and reboot or power-cycle, the Beagle will reinstall from the card -- just like it's supposed to. This backup also has the advantage of storing your other customizations made from the admin interface.

  • jksjks
    Yes, updating from v1.2 directly to v1.49 worked for me. But it's always possible your v1.2 sd card from Seeed was bad. Since it doesn't seem to work anyway you might as well overwrite it with the latest image from kiwisdr.com or dropbox.com For those that don't know see here for details: http://kiwisdr.com/quickstart/index.html#id-dload

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