I'm flashing the image every 2 to 3 weeks!

sometimes i turn on my rpi3 (osmc) i see 4 green blinks then nothing happens. so i flash again the image.
the problem is this is started to happen every 2 to 3 weeks, and honnestly im getting sick of reflashing and reset everything from scratch

if the only sollution is by flashing is there any way to flash and restore my previous setup!
im installing osmc and retropie on top of it with retrosmc script

Can I suggest a new SD card?

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You can image the entire card with something like Win32DiskImager. That is what I use to clone the SD cards for my various RPi’s. The image will be the size of your SD card and if that is an issue for storage just compress it into a zip file or similar.

In addition to possibly being a defective SD card as grahamh alluded to it might also be an issue with improper shutdowns, an insufficient PSU, or over ambitious overclocking settings. If you have a card reader pop the thing in your PC next time it messes up and see if the config.txt file is present and actually contains the information it should. Sometimes this file can go missing and all you would need is to replace that and not reimage or start from scratch.

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Hi,

It seems like your SD card may be problematic.

Some SD cards are not genuine or have a lower capacity than advertised. Some simply fail over time.

Symptoms of SD cards not working correctly are:

  • Read-only behaviour, or changes made not persisting
  • A filesystem corruption error

Symptoms of counterfeit SD cards are:

  • Writing works until a certain filesystem size is reached, thereafter, writes seem to cause issues where existing data is lost or newly written data is not preserved.
  • SD card fails after a short amount of time.

Counterfeit cards are usually found on Amazon and eBay.

SD cards have a limited lifespan. I recommend you change SD card and suspect that issues will no longer persist with a good card. If you would like to be a good quality SD card purpose manufactured for OSMC, then you can find one in the Store.

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Apart that I also agree that first thing would be to replace the SD card with one of known good quality, and to ensure that the power supply is really suitable for the RPi, but regarding reflashing, to at least avoid setting everything from scratch every time I’d suggest once the system is fully configured, turn off the RPi and then take an backup image of that SD card (in Linux it could be done with a simple dd command).

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i’ts a genuine samsung class 10 16Gb memory card (but its old a little bit)

They have a limited lifespan