Restore to default state?

[RomanV]

Is there a way to restore RPi to it's 'default' state without formatting SD-card?
Maybe some kind of a script that will uninstall all the packages and remove user data?

[W. H. Heydt]

If you use the disk imager program, you can just overwrite the card and that will wipe everything that was there before. No need to reformat the card first.

[Rive]

You mean like a "reset/restore"? No.

You will have to reinstall the image.


I keep a "master" backup image (of the way my pi3 is right now). So, for whatever reason, I can simply pop in the sdcard to the media reader, and using diskimager, write the backup image back to the sdcard. Very convenient. Takes like 30 min to restore the 32GB sdcard.

To prevent data loss, I have a 16GB USB thumb drive in the pi, that I use to store anything I don't want to lose as like local storage.

[B.Goode]

Is there a way to restore RPi to it's 'default' state without formatting SD-card?
Maybe some kind of a script that will uninstall all the packages and remove user data?

What are you *really* trying to do?

The Raspberry Pi hardware itself has no storage of its own: once the SD card is removed it is in pretty much the same default state as it was when it left the factory.

One way to restore your RPi's Operating System to its default state is to re-flash an image of an Operating System (such as Raspbian) to another SD card. Neither the original nor new SD card needs to be formatted.

Another interpretation might be to use the NOOBS Installer. Initially, this requires the SD card to be appropriately formatted to get the Installer running in the first place. But once you have done that, you can re-install the 'factory-fresh' version of the Operating System as many times as you wish without ever having to re-format the SD card.