A few thoughts

USB Image Tool support forum
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drewkeller
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:07 pm

A few thoughts

Post by drewkeller »

First of all, I love this program. This is THE WAY TO DO IT as far as I'm concerned for backing up/restoring images for Raspberry Pi (which uses SD and micro SD cards for its OS). Most tutorials and info say to use Win32DiskImager, but that is NOT the way to do it. For a number of reasons that I've already written about: http://www.drewkeller.com/content/readi ... spberry-pi

After using USB Image Tool for a few months, here are some of my thoughts.
  • Would be cool to support drag'n'drop. Drop an image file on a disk icon and ask for confirmation before restoring.
  • Remember which image type was previously selected (between sessions). Or have an option to select the preferred format (.img or .img.gz).
  • My raspberry pi only uses around 3.5-4.5 GB of an 8GB card. Only the first 5GB is partitioned. It would save a bunch of time if USBIT could tell if it's reached the end of the used space and then stop (restoring and/or backing up).
  • I selected the option to "truncate oversize images" (awesome feature, by the way), because not all 8GB flash cards are exactly the same available capacity. However, when restoring these, for some reason, the percentage restored goes up to 100% and then keeps going, maybe up to 200% (I'm always doing something else instead of watching such things, but it definitely goes past 150%).
Is the source code available somewhere?

I'm forgetting something, I'm sure.
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: A few thoughts

Post by Alex »

Thanks for your suggestions. I will try to add drag'n'drop and keeping the file type with the next version. To detect the end of partitioned space will be more difficult, but I will see, if I can do something about that in the future.

I will also try to fix the percentage issue, if it has to do with the truncate option. Did this occur with gz compressed images or also uncompressed ones? For gz images there is the problem, that the gz file format can't store the raw image files size correctly, if it's bigger than 4Gib.

The source code is not public available.
drewkeller
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:07 pm

Re: A few thoughts

Post by drewkeller »

Awesome!

I use the compressed format. I don't see any reason to use uncompressed for my use case (waste of disk space). My images turn out to be just under 4GB.

Perhaps another suggestion would be to include a user-friendly formatted number for the disk sizes, with "floating" units (auto select GB, MB, KB, etc). I have some code I use for this in my programs if you're interested.
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: A few thoughts

Post by Alex »

Looks like there will be no Drag'n'Drop fur USB Image Tool. Because of the fact, that writing directly to the physical drive needs admin rights, drag'n'drop from non-elevated programs (like the explorer) won't work.

More info here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3794 ... pplication
drewkeller
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:07 pm

Re: A few thoughts

Post by drewkeller »

oh, right. I didn't think about that.
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