
USBImager – A minimal GUI app that can write disk images to USB drives - jakobdabo
https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/
======
rvz
YES.

This is the replacement open-source GUI USB imager app I have been waiting
for.

> 500KB vs 210 MB

Essentially this is a 99.99999% reduction of disk space and run-time usage
with the same functionality which really puts its electron garbage counterpart
to infinite shame. There is no contest here.

Feel the satisfying moment of removing this 'balenaEtcher' bloatware and
replace it with a true, efficient and magnificent cross-platform native
alternative app.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Balena means whale, btw.

Not sure why one would choose it, when there are so many options.

~~~
CyberDildonics
I think it is recommended on a lot of websites for making raspian images.

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SyneRyder
Suggestion for the developer if they see this - please add a PayPal or other
donation option in addition to BTC. Just a bit too much friction on BTC for
normals/muggles like me, but if there was a PayPal link you might have had
money in your account by now.

I want to support this just because of what it represents - native app
development, small executables, tools that are optimized. None of this bloated
Electron junk. I bet they could even put some Etcher like graphics / PNGs into
this interface and it would still be 100x smaller than Etcher.

I wonder if it would be possible to port this natively to Haiku too?

------
mehrdadn
Related projects I know of (might be useful if someone can point out salient
differences):

\- Rufus: [https://rufus.ie/](https://rufus.ie/)

\- UNetbootin: [https://unetbootin.github.io/](https://unetbootin.github.io/)

\- Win32 Disk Imager:
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/)

~~~
noxer
\- YUMI [https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-
creator/](https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/)

\- Ventoy [https://www.ventoy.net](https://www.ventoy.net)

usbimager_1.0.4-i686-win-gdi crashes without error and leaves a USB corrupt
(works fine again after a format)

------
pjmlp
Kids this is how one does cross platform properly since the early days of
computing, without Electron fat.

------
lomkju
dd is just 79K

As simple as

sudo dd if=name-of-iso.iso of=/dev/sdb status="progress"

[https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-
bootabl...](https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootable-on-
usb-drive-6671945d95a6)

You're Welcome.

~~~
pantalaimon
Actually you can just use cp

    
    
        cp name-of-iso.iso /dev/sdb

~~~
charlesdaniels
If you care about showing the progress

    
    
        pv < input.iso > /dev/sdX
    

Is a more portable way to do that, as "status=progress" is a GNU modification
to dd, as I recall. Of course the most portable is to use one of the POSIX
mainstays like cat or cp.

------
peter_d_sherman
It would be an interesting test to test all USB imagers alongside one another,
and then use a different USB imager than the one used to write the USB stick,
to verify it.

Or, use every USB imager other than the one used as the writer -- to perform
multiple verifications...

Perhaps one would find interesting discrepancies in some, but probably not
all, USB imaging softwares -- that way...

Anyway, this one seems to deserve some points for being quite close to as
simple as possible, with as minimum dependencies as possible...

~~~
fuzzfactor
This does seem like excellent work.

Maybe Etcher accomplishes some of this too.

Seems to me the imaging is more perfect than the subsequent hardware
interaction.

Different USB drives and controllers can have greatly dissimilar working
geometries as they carry partitions & filesystems, so the hardware is not
really interchangeable enough to begin with for direct imaging to be a very
reliable means of getting a different partition and/or filesystem onto a flash
drive for instance.

The working layout may or may not be based on the _native_ detected geometry
of the device.

And mainboards can have their preferences as to which geometries they prefer
and when.

This can make data appear to disappear depending on where you plug in the USB
drive, and more commonly cause difficulty booting.

The IMG file of a floppy disk is standard but the blank disk always needed
complete perfect sectors to write the IMG to, afterward their FAT12 filesystem
was universally accessible and bootable just like it had actually been
formatted indivdually by standard MSDOS. It was just a clone.

The ISO of a CDROM is standardized too.

USB drive behavior is not very standard, so an IMG or DD type file captured
from a particular device can not be expected to perform indentically unless it
is restored in an identical way to the original device or an equivalent device
which has no show-stopping dissimilarity.

Since the beginning until just recently USB flash drives were sold pre-
formatted with FAT32. Now they are just getting too big for FAT32, so over
32GB has NTFS.

Now not always will most of the drives in the world have been originally
formatted with very Microsoft-compatible procedures. At least one major
supplier has a fundamental formatting error propagated for years. Different
mainboards will tolerate this to different degrees.

Depending on what you start with the image you capture might not be the best
to rely on.

Defragmentation can also be an issue to work around.

A Live Linux distribution intended for direct _burning_ to flash drives is not
a good distribution method compared to burning the ISO to disk.

Rufus is good because it takes a bootable ISO and writes it in a file-based
way onto just about any USB device, and various USB drives end up more
bootable than you can get from perfectly copying a prepared master image
bitwise.

------
mumblerino
Side note: macOS ships with Disk Utility, which as far as I know can do
exactly this, relatively easily, so I don’t think you need 3rd-party software.

~~~
shock
GNOME Disks can also write an image to a disk.

------
tinus_hn
Does this produce bootable drives? Thought you needed al kinds of custom stuff
for that.

------
mikece
balenaEtcher has spyware?

The size versus Etcher -- 256 kb to 210 MB -- makes this worth checking out!

~~~
mig39
balenaEtcher has advertising for sure. Not sure about spyware.

~~~
mbroncano
It’s debatable whether there’s an actual difference nowadays.

~~~
colejohnson66
I can’t really see it as spyware if it’s your own product, though.

------
keaneu
It just says "USB image writer has stopped working" when trying to create a
backup image file from device (on Win10 Pro here).

------
brian_herman
i wonder how this compares to rufus?

~~~
watersb
Rufus is great, but Windows only.

~~~
brian_herman
yeah maybe i should give this a try then

