How to backup AR300M firmware

yadox · 2017-12-20T00:07:08.000Z

I have made many modifications and personalize my AR300M router Openwrt distro, with packages and configurations, etc. I would like to make a full firmware backup to copy it to other AR300M devices. Can you help me?

bluewavenet · 2017-12-20T20:47:55.000Z

By OpenWrt distro, do you mean you are building your own image from scratch? If so you are better off using the LEDE stable release as the old OpenWrt has not been updated for a few years now.

You can’t easily backup the image, but then there is no real need to do so if it is your own image, just include everything you need.

Post image data/config backup (excluding packages) can be done via Luci UI or the sysupgrade CLI.

The data to be backed up is controlled by the file /etc/sysupgrade.conf

Bare in mind that anything included in the image that is backed up then restored, will use at least double the amount of flash memory when restored (a consequence of the read only, compressed data in the image).

yadox · 2017-12-20T21:02:25.000Z

Yes, I know that. I think it’s more professional to work with the LEDE openwrt trunk and from that create your settings, packages, binaries, etc. But just in case I’ve been working from inside, installing scripts, packages and binaries (what’s my case) I will have two options:

make a backup for everything I have modified and recover it in LEDE build system.
try to make a full copy of NAND flash actual image. As you say it’s too complicated, but still posible (maybe from uboot) using UART and dumping it. Any hints?

Thank you.

bluewavenet · 2017-12-20T21:13:33.000Z

Once you have got used to the imagebuilder, it is so quick and simple to make a new image that it is not worth bothering trying to hack an existing image. Also the imagebuilder compresses everything into the image saving a lot of space compared with an image you have installed many packages on top of.

You can use opkg to list everything installed using

echo $(opkg list_installed | awk ‘{ print $1 }’)

The output is perfect for the make command line.

bluewavenet · 2017-12-20T21:20:01.000Z

Also the NAND flash version is being discontinued as far as I know and replaced by the AR300M-16 and AR300M-Lite.