Migrate between architectures: Pi 3 → Pi 4

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hello!

I searched for some mention of migrating an install from Pi 3 to 4, but nothing seemed to turn up.

With Raspberry Pi OS I can use the same SD card and it works on both, but OSMC has separate images for these two devices. Not sure about the details of how piOS accomplished that though.

Is there a clever way to migrate easily?

Or do you need to work from a clean install, copy home, reinstall packages, and manually move configs outside of home (smb, systemd symlinks and overrides, etc) as the need arises?

If there’s no OSMC specific migration guide/path then I’ll turn to some general Debian guide.

2

Yes unfortunately.

3

You should use the OSMC backup utility. Make sure your device is on the latest version first

Raspberry Pi OS is not optimised specifically for Pi 4 as they try and preserve backward compatibility in the form of a unified image. We prefer to have separate, specific images so that we can take advantage of the more modern Pi devices more effectively

Thanks for your understanding.

4

Thank you.

I assume the backup utility only backs up exactly what it says in the GUI, judging by the sparse Wiki entry on the subject, so I guess it’s the manual route for me if I also want the things I mentioned, like smb and systemd configuration.

Can’t really upgrade to latest OSMC on the Pi 3 anyway since there are regressions, as you’ve mentioned in the blog, whose implications I’m less than sure about. Like whether or not the Pi foundation has the intention to fix them on Pi 3 in the future, and whether that’s even possible. Considering the Pi 4 currently fails to play some video files that the Pi 3 can play, I think it’s wise to leave the Pi 3 on Kodi 18.

5

Correct, the Kodi backup add-on only gives options to backup things in Kodi’s wserdata folder. The backup utility in the My OSMC add-on (in the updates section) does the same but also can backup system mounts, samba config, and SSH keys. Anything else would have to be taken care of some other way.

6

Good to know. Probably a recent addition, since I cannot see them in the 2020 nov release.

Thanks for your replies. You’re always very responsive here, I don’t know how you keep up.

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