Tutorial:- Fast backup and restore (cloning) of Amiga CF's =D

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fitzsteve

fitzsteve

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Hi All,

I've been testing today a method for quickly reproducing Amiga CF cards and have found WinImage really useful for this:

http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm (Works fine on my Win7 64bit PC)

I created my 4gb CF in WinUAE as per normal, setting up Classic Workbench and fully loading my CF with WHDLoad Games/Demos.

Using WinImage I was able to make a complete image of my CF in less than 20 minutes and restore another CF as an exact replica in about the same amount of time. The actual speed will obviously depend on the specification of your PC.

It is however much faster than recreating in it WinUAE from scratch (this process normally takes me a couple of hours, mostly waiting for WHDLoad Games to copy!) :cool:

It's definitely a great way to back up your CF's and restore them should you have any unfortunate accidents :thumbsup:


Here are the steps to backup your CF:


  • Download and install WinImage
  • Remove your CF card from your Amiga (carefully!)
  • Plug the CF into your PC's USB Card reader
  • DO NOT let Windoze format the CF :Doh:
  • Open WinImage
  • In the menu bar at the top choose 'Disk/Create Virtual hard Disk Image from Physical Drive'
  • Select the Disk you wish to backup from the list
  • Choose a place and name for your CF HDD Image File
  • Make a Coffee and browse the Amibay 'for sale' section whilst the progress bar makes it's way from left to right...

Here are the steps to restore your backup file:


  • Insert your blank CF card into your PC's USB Card Reader
  • Open WinImage
  • In the menu bar at the top choose 'Disk/Restore Virtual Hard Disk Image on Physical Drive'
  • Choose the Disk you want to restore to *Be very careful not to choose the wrong Disk as you could erase another drive by mistake!* You have been warned :whistle:
  • Browse to your backup folder and choose the image to be restored
  • Now it's just a case of waiting for the image to be written to the CF Card.

I found that even a brand new CF card without any Amiga RDB was able to have the image written to it and works like a charm. No need to use Diskpart to clean it first!

WinImage is a Shareware program and the unregistered version is only usable for 30 days. After that you need to register :)

Thanks to Johnim for pointing out, you can also use your Virtual Hard Drive image with WinUAE, just mount it like any other HDF and you can boot from it and use your Workbench.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy :thumbsup:
 
Last edited:
Great stuff Steve:thumbsup:

Excellent backup process & easy restoration:o

What else can an amiga user ask for;)
 
That's awesome :thumbsup:

I know I seen some posts before where people were looking for a good method of cloning amiga disks .. this is pretty much it isn't? Any limitations that you have ran into? :)
 
It's my pleasure to share this guys. I've not seen any issues yet, I reproduced both FFS and SFS formatted CF's, fully loaded and they work like a charm, exact replica's as far as I can tell :)

It's worth noting I am running WinImage as 'Administrator' :ninja:

I would imagine the CF has to be the same size as the backup you want to restore, I guess that goes without saying but I know some 4gb CF's report 3.7gb and others 3.8gb so using the same brand would be the best option.

All the CF's I tested were the same make/model.
 
This is great, Steve. I have a video toaster machine and the CF that I have been using has software installed where the floppy disks are no longer functioning and I can't find backups. This will be a big help :)

One question - say that I make an image from a 4gb card and restore it to an 8gb card. I just end up with 4gb of empty space at the end?

Thanks, and great write-up :)
 
esc said:
This is great, Steve. I have a video toaster machine and the CF that I have been using has software installed where the floppy disks are no longer functioning and I can't find backups. This will be a big help :)

One question - say that I make an image from a 4gb card and restore it to an 8gb card. I just end up with 4gb of empty space at the end?

Thanks, and great write-up :)
Click to expand...

Hmm that's a good question, I imagine you will need to use the same size CF as the image, the only way to know for sure the outcome is to try it :o

You might be able to create another partition on the free space assuming it allows you to make the restore in the first place.

Remember to also take into consideration the Amiga's 4gb limitation in 3.0/3.1 Rom :cool:
 
My "system" is a little different.
I create an HDF file (usually the same size/structure as the drive I want to backup), format it & copy the files over.
Then I can "restore" from that.
 
One of the earlier threads asking for something similar was mine. I ended up using another program (can't remember its name) but it created a physical image as well. Some comments in that thread suggested that as it was a byte by byte copy it was not great for use on a cf card due to the number of writes. Is this the same?

Sent from my HTC One X.
 
Indeed I imagine it writes to every block of the card but the idea is you should only have to do the procedure once and perhaps again if something goes horribly wrong.

It would certainly not be advisable to continuously restore the CF with different images.
 
Yeah that was how I figured it. I used one that directly copied from one cf to my backup card. Am looking at pd image creator as well though.

Sent from my HTC One X.
 
I've also tried this with PD Image Creator earlier. It's certainly a lot faster than copying files within WinUAE.

As said above, it only works with exactly the same size cards. (At least for amiga partitions. I guess you'll find programs that can change size for FAT/NTFS images)
Keep in mind that size varies also between different revisions of the same model CF/SD card.
(I've had three identical looking SD cards all with slightly different sizes.)

The problem with writing to flash media this way is not that you add one write cycle everywhere, it's that the card completely runs out of 'unused' blocks.
If all blocks have been written to, the card's firmware can only know what is free space and used space through 'TRIM' which is not possible on amiga. (The firmware does not know any file systems, at least not any amiga fs)

I don't know much about wear-levelling, but I know it works by distributing writes to avoid wearing out blocks. This will still work, but as far as I understand, the problem in the scenario above is that when one block does fail for whatever reason, it needs an unused block to save that data to, and if you did a full block-by-block write, the card has no unused blocks any more.

Edit: Performing a normal format, instead of a quick format creates the same problem, except that there probably will be a few blocks left after the last partition that the firmware can use.
 
Last edited:
And if you use Linux (or install Cygwin or similar to Windoze):

- Create backup image

Code: 
dd if=/dev/sdb of=cf.img
- Restore backup image

Code: 
dd if=cf.img of=/dev/sdb

Assuming your CF is device sdb of course.
 
... and in os x you just use the built in disk tools to make a disk image and to write to a new cf card (all using gui tools)

... or you can use dd as with linux if you prefer command line, also included in os x.
 
Been needing a simple and fast solution many times, so cheers a lot ! :D
 
Works!

Works!

Thanks works well.Just followed your instructions copied classic workbench from a 4gb card to another ,put it back into my Amiga 1200 and it works .Thanks very much ,been trying to do this
Regards
Damon
 
Damon1971 said:
Thanks works well.Just followed your instructions copied classic workbench from a 4gb card to another ,put it back into my Amiga 1200 and it works .Thanks very much ,been trying to do this
Regards
Damon
Click to expand...

That's awesome news :)

Thanks for reporting back :thumbsup:
 
Thanks for the tutorial! I've been a registered WinImage user for at least 10 years. I hadn't thought of trying to backup an Amiga formatted drive before!

Thanks,

Heather
 
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