ESP8266 Community Forum

I want to save to disk the firmware that comes with a brand new ESP8266-12 before I put nodeMCU on the chip, because I like the original version. So, per the author's instructions (https://github.com/themadinventor/esptool):

./esptool.py dump_mem 0x40000000 65536 iram0.bin

That works, but how exactly do I back up the whole thing? That is, which address and what size?
How do I know if there's more than one file?

Thanks!

I've dumped my NodeMCU hw modules with -

# esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 115200 read_flash 0x00000 0x400000 nodemcu-1.0.bin

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Mozz

"dump_mem" and "read_flash" are not the same thing.
"dump_mem" example your mentioned is reading memory, whatever it is, RAM or anything else.
"read_flash" is really the option to do backup of the flash, as Mario said.

That's good to know, thanks!