pi-Stomp Manual Maintenance

Backup & Restore

Back up your pedalboards and user data for safekeeping or to transfer to a different pi-Stomp. Restore merges the backup into the target system: it adds missing files and overwrites existing ones with the archived copy when the archived copy is newer (unzip -o -u).

What's included

The backup includes everything under /home/pistomp/data/:

Backup to USB drive

  1. Insert a USB drive (500 MB or more) into the pi-Stomp
  2. On the LCD, navigate to System Menu → Pedalboard Management → Backup data
  3. Wait for the backup to complete (a minute or two)

The backup is written to backups/pistomp_backup.zip on the USB drive. Once it finishes, you can remove the drive.

Backup data is greyed out until you connect a writable USB drive. If you select it with no such drive, pi-Stomp shows "No writable USB drive".

The .lv2/ directory holds user-installed plugins downloaded through MOD-UI (PatchStorage). It's excluded to keep the backup small; re-download those plugins from PatchStorage on the target system. Factory plugins live in /usr/lib/lv2 and come from the OS image, not this directory.

Restore from USB drive

  1. Insert the USB drive containing the backup
  2. On the LCD, navigate to System Menu → Pedalboard Management → Restore Backup data
  3. Wait for the restore to complete (this can take a few minutes)

The restore runs unzip -o -u on the backup file, overwriting and updating files in /home/pistomp/data. After the restore completes, the sound engine restarts automatically.

Restore Backup data is greyed out until a connected drive holds backups/pistomp_backup.zip. If you select it with no such drive, pi-Stomp shows "No backup found on USB". A read-only drive is a correct source, because the restore only reads the archive.

Backup via SCP

For a quick backup over the network:

scp -r --exclude='.lv2' pistomp@pistomp.local:/home/pistomp/data ./pistomp-backup/

Restore from SCP

To restore from a local backup over the network:

scp -r ./pistomp-backup/data/* pistomp@pistomp.local:/home/pistomp/data/

After the restore completes, restart the sound engine from the System Menu or reboot the pi-Stomp.

Transferring to a new pi-Stomp OS

  1. Back up the old pi-Stomp state to a USB drive
  2. Flash the latest OS image on the new pi-Stomp's SD card
  3. Boot the new pi-Stomp OS and insert the USB drive
  4. Choose "Restore" on the welcome screen. The button becomes available about a second after you connect the drive