Litho

Flash disk images to USB drives (and other block devices) and clone devices back to image files. Litho ships a CLI (litho), an interactive terminal UI (litho-tui), and a Rust library used by the Lithographer desktop app.

Supported for full use: Linux and Windows. macOS is experimental.

What you need

Querying devices does not require elevation.

Install / build (end users)

If you only want the GUI, install Lithographer instead.

Important: enable real-io for actual flash/clone

By default this crate builds in simulation mode (simulated-io): progress is shown but disks are not written. That keeps development and accidental installs safe.

For a real flash/clone tool, always pass --no-default-features --features real-io.

Install from crates.io (when published)

Crate name on crates.io: liblitho (binaries are still named litho and litho-tui).

# Required for real disk I/O
cargo install liblitho --no-default-features --features real-io

# Then:
sudo litho --help
litho-tui --help

Without those flags, cargo install liblitho installs a simulation-only build (safe, but it will not write images to devices).

Build from source

# Real disk I/O (what you want for actual flash/clone)
cargo build --release --no-default-features --features real-io --bin litho --bin litho-tui

# Dev / tests only — simulation, no real writes
cargo build
cargo test

Quick start — CLI

Always double-check the device path. Flashing the wrong disk destroys data.

# List devices (no root needed)
litho query

# Flash (Linux example)
sudo litho flash --file /path/to/image.img --device /dev/sdX

# Flash compressed image + verify write
sudo litho flash -f image.img.xz -d /dev/sdX --verify

# Clone a device to a file
sudo litho clone --device /dev/sdX --file /path/to/backup.img

Common options

On Windows, confirm volume dismount in the TUI, or pass --yes on the CLI.

Quick start — TUI

sudo ./target/release/litho-tui
# or unprivileged: you will be prompted to elevate (pkexec / UAC)
./target/release/litho-tui

Everyday shortcuts

Launch with options

litho-tui --mode flash --device /dev/sdb --image ./image.img
litho-tui --help

Safety

• Prefer removable USB/SD media as the flash target when possible.
• Litho refuses the system disk, partitions (use the whole disk), and busy/mounted volumes until you confirm unmount/dismount.
• Cancel stops between I/O blocks; a cancelled flash may leave a partially written device.

GUI

For a graphical frontend, use Lithographer. It runs as a normal user app and elevates only the litho helper for flash/clone.

More documentation

License

MIT — see Cargo.toml.