I am running Debian on my Nanonote. I just flashed a Debian Sid image onto there.

So, I've been trying to help study the problem of the lack of ability to backup and restore a NanoNote UBIFS image with xburst-tools utilities. Here's what I've got so far....

The utility xbboot is a simple compared to usbboot, which has a couple notable functions: bulk_read and bulk_write.

And xbboot can only be run after the device is put into USB boot mode.

If someone can write a stage 1 and 2 implementation with software that will provide a dumping toolchain after:

usbboot -c boot

Then xbburst can overwrite a modified/different stage 1 and 2 on the specific memory addresses, which should allow the UBI root filesystem and kernel uImage to be dumped for backup with bulk_read, and restored with bulk_write. So it needs read/write access.

Anyone could also write a C program using libusb with OpenWRT or Debian on the Nanonote to do this while the OS is running (hopefully in memory). It would be difficult to do a restore the system is running, however. And some things shouldn't be backed up and restored, like /dev, /sys, /mnt, /media and /proc for example...

My final idea is to back up everything on an SD card formatted with UBIFS. To do this, first the mtd-utils package must be installed, then use.

fdisk -l
[partition the SD card]
mkfs.ubifs [/dev/sdcard]
[put SD card in nanonote and do this]
mount [sdcard] /mnt
rsync -av {/boot,/etc,/home,/usr, [...]} /mnt
umount /mnt

And finally the card could be written somehow, using a utility like dd or another utility that I don't happen to know about, to create a UBI image.

There's my three ideas. Anyone else have any good ideas?