Run Mobian Unstable without risking being stuck without a working phone

[RTP]

If you follow the Mobian blog you may know there is an unstable branch now for those who want to test the cutting edge.

https://blog.mobian-project.org/posts/20...le-distro/

Some of you may be afraid to switch because you needs your phones to work and can't take the risk of something unstable upsetting that.

You can have your cake and eat it too. You can clone your drive via Balena Etcher onto an SD card or create an ISO image of it (back up) using Disks in Linux and burn it to an SD card. Even an encrypted drive. You should have a back up anyway. Use Jumpdrive on an SD to allow your computer to see the Emmc and don't decrypt it before cloning. Then you can use the SD card image for unstable and leave the Emmc alone. If things break you can just remove the SD card and still have a working phone in a pinch just by removing it. Make a change in the order of your favorite apps so you know what you are booted into. (exaple, put your phone on the left on the SD card image) The reason why is sometimes after an update on the Emmc your phone will only boot to the newer boot Image (the Emmc) but you can over ride that temporarily because some type of temporary FEL mode must be activated. Power and volume down will boot back into the SD card. Power and volume up will boot into the Emmc until the next update on the SD card. Then it will be normal boot priority with the SD card.

Or if you have a Linux laptop/desktop, throw in a Jumpdrive sdcard and use lsblk/dmesg to find the emmc and dd to copy and even restore the backup.

Then run (from laptop hooked to Jumpdrive booted phone):

Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/EMMClocation of=Mobian-backup.img bs=12M status=progress

Then use Jumpdrive once again (reverse the if/of option values) to put right back on your emmc if something goes wrong