How I backup Arduino IDE and libraries on Linux

Below is the rsync script I use. I rsync the home folder Arduino libraries to a network mount (NAS). This is because changing a library version independent of the compiler or other code in a project can cause breakages. Normally libraries would be versioned in a project but Arduino doesn’t have such project management natively at time of writing

I also rsync the IDE itself so the IDE/Compiler version is stored against the current library versions. Notice my IDE is running from a folder in downloads.

You will need to adjust these paths for your source and destination folders. The rsync command flags explained are: -a for archive and mirror directory structure, --progress show the ETA for the transfer then you just specify the <src> and <dst> directories.

arduino-backup.sh

#!/bin/bash

rsync -a --progress ~/Arduino/libraries /mnt/foo/backups/arduino/

rsync -a --progress ~/downloads/arduino-1.8.8 /mnt/foo/backups/arduino/

I have seen other large Arduino based projects on GitHub doing essentially the same by using a shell script called ./fetch_deps.sh with git clone hardcoded git checkout commit id strings. See: disaster-radio/fetch_deps.sh

Alternatives

The best alternative I have seen is a actual package manager/project manager for IoT which aims to unify the tool chain for embedded systems development and works with Arduino, see: PlatformIO

Notes

This post has been a draft a while and is relevant to Arduino IDE versions around: 1.8.8, 1.8.12

A friend of mine recently ran into a library versioning issue so I thought I better finally get this post out.

Seems the new Arduino IDE version 2.0.0-beta.3 is based on VS Code. Everything is slowing going this way it seems. Something I touched on in my blog post: A state of text editors in late 2019