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I have a lot of Pi's to upgrade, 30+ with different payloads. Is it possible to do this using a img file on a USB stick rather than downloading the 500MB or so for each one.

Sabreur
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  • Dig around about `apt-cacher`; you can use it to do this for normal daily updates (ie., set up one machine to cache the updates so any particular package need only be downloaded once), but I don't know if it will do the same for a system upgrade. – goldilocks Feb 13 '22 at 19:30

1 Answers1

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Do not upgrade from Buster to Bullseye!

Search this site and you will find lots of questions about problems people had when they upgraded from Buster to Bullseye. For example:

No internet connection post-buster to bullseye upgrade

How to disable the dynamic IP address after assigning a static IP in Bullseye?

Raspberry Pi Foundation does not support upgrading from Buster to Bullseye. They recommend that you use a fresh image of Bullseye.

Option 1: Keep using Buster

The Pi Foundation recognizes that it is not practical or possible to migrate all applications from Buster to Bullseye. They will continue to maintain Buster as a Legacy version of the OS.

Therefore, it is okay to continue to use Buster and keep it updated using the usual:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Option 2: Replace Buster with Fresh Install of Bullseye

This may be a good time to buy new SD cards and flash them with the new Bullseye version of the Raspberry Pi OS. You will need to install all the apps you use and redo all the customization you have made.

On the bright side, the latest version of Pi Imager allows customizing hostname, username, password, ssh public key, etc. in the advanced setup of the Pi Imager. So that these personalization can be done before the image file is written to the SD card.

Steps:

Download the Bullseye image.

Download and install the Pi Imager on your computer.

Buy 30+ new SD cards.

Flash each card with the Bullseye image after changing hostname, username, password etc. in each case in the Pi Imager app.

Shutdown each Pi and replace SD card. Turn each Pi on with the new SD card.

Hope this helps

user68186
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