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Making a backup is essential, but know how to do the restore in case of disaster it is what saves your evening (or live). The process is the exact opposite of backup: we take the archive from our PC and “let's inject” directly into the Dwarf filesystem via SSH.

Total restoration of the Pedalboards

If you want to restore the whole package (pedalboard, banks and user files) that you saved with the previous script, the command to launch from your Linux terminal is the following:

# Attenzione: lancia questo comando dalla cartella dove si trova il file .tar.gz
cat dwarf_backup_DATA_ORA.tar.gz | ssh root@192.168.51.1 "tar -xz -C /data"

What happens here? cat reads the file on your PC, passes it through the SSH tunnel, and the tar on the Dwarf it unpacks it in real time directly into the directory /data.

Selective recovery (Single Pedalboard)

Sometimes you don't want to plan everything, but only recover a specific pedalboard that you accidentally deleted. In this case, you can extract only that folder from the archive:

# Esempio per ripristinare solo la pedalboard "MioSuonoSolo"
tar -xzf dwarf_backup_DATA.tar.gz pedalboards/MioSuonoSolo.pedalboard/
scp -r pedalboards/MioSuonoSolo.pedalboard/ root@192.168.51.1:/data/pedalboards/

Fundamental step: System refresh

The Dwarf MOD loads data when the service starts. If you upload new files via SSH while the drive is powered on, changes may not appear immediately in the web interface. To force a reload without physically rebooting the hardware, you can restart the service mod-ui (if the firmware allows it via shell) or more simply restart the unit:

ssh root@192.168.51.1 "reboot"

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Security Considerations

Like any write operation via root, be careful. If you unpack a corrupt archive or one in the wrong location, you may have to resort to Factory Reset of the Dwarf. My advice? Always check the contents of the backup before restoring with a simple tar -ztvf backup.tar.gz.

Technical note: Plugins installed via the official store are managed by Dwarf's internal database. Restoring plugin binaries via SSH is useful for those installed manually (your files .lv2 compiled or downloaded elsewhere).