Cloned (with Balena) SD card shows 64.1 GB - to big to clone again

balenaEtcher
1

Cloned (with Balena) SD card shows 64.1 GB - to big to clone again.

The SD card is for Raspberry Pi

To be clear, I created this card as as a clone of another one. I’ve been using it for a while in the Pi and now I want to clone it to make a back up of the changes but I’m stuck due to Balena telling me the size if 64.1GB

I’m running BalenaEtcher 1.1.6 on Windows 10 (and how do I get 1.1.9?).

Samsung 64 EVO select.

3

Hi there, to upgrade balenaEtcher you can do one of the following:

  1. In Etcher, select the Settings (gear-icon) and enable auto-updates
  2. Download the latest version and upgrade manually here: balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives

That said, it’s interesting to know that the card is showing your data is too large to clone again. After you’ve applied the latest update, can you share a bit more with us?

  • How much capacity was used before you cloned the last time?
  • What partitioning scheme do you use?
  • How many times has the image been cloned previously, and have you noticed size changes after previous clones?

Thank you!

5

balenaEtcher shows version 1.1.6 with you auto updates on. But your website indicates the latest is 1.1.9?

Current usage shown on Raspberry Pi 4

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 61229808 16146036 43186984 28% /

I did not explicitly partition, just opened the SD card package on used it as a clone target.

The cards show two partitions. A 252MB boot and the partition shown above.

Please tell me what tool to use to get any other info you need.

This was a single clone. Now I want the (updated) clone to be the source for subsequent cloning.

9

@dts350z Thanks for following up with us. We’ve had some internal discussion about what you’re seeing and I learned some things along the way…

  1. While we offer the “automatic updates” feature for Linux distros, it’s not fully automated on our side at the moment. We of course plan to make it automated going forward, but have had some issues with our automated process internally that was preventing this, so we’ve been manually pushing updates for Linux the last few releases. The good news is this discussion reminded the team to push another update, so you should see that soon.

  2. When we clone a drive, we use the whole drive data. You and I were working under the assumption that the size of the cloned source would only be readable data, which is not the case. So if you have a 64GB source, it will need a 64GB+ target. The reason you’re likely only seeing this now is that you still had enough room after cloning the first source image for a bit of growth, but after the latest it has grown again and thus it’s become too large finally for the 64GB target.

Let me know if that makes sense and if you have any other questions for us, please do ask!