Hi,

I would like to backup the booted SDcard of my Raspberry pi.

I don’t necessary need to backup as a hot backup[1] So I can remove the SDcard and make the backup on another machine.

with dd 
$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 29.72 GiB .....
....
Device
/dev/sda1 ...
/dev/sda1 ...

So I first tried:

$ dd bs=4M if=/dev/sda conv=fsync status=progress | gzip > /path/path/foobar.gz

But this create a huge .gz file ! because it backup the unused space too :'(

If you know a ~simple command to just backup the used space I’m all ears.

with rpi-clone

I’ve discovered rpi-clone

Seem really great, too bad the github tab discussion has been not activated :/ and If the documentation is not clear enough, no way to ask the community.

EDIT: Actually it seem that it clone a SD to a full dest drive ! so not as destination file correct ??

in the README you can read:

rpi-clone-setup is for setting the hostname in /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts files.

It is run automatically by rpi-clone if -s args are given, but before your first clone using a -s option, test run rpi-clone-setup with:

rpi-clone-setup -t testhostname

So what is the purpose of the -s argument ? If you want to set another hostname into the destination backup ? why can we set fews ? Can we have few hostname for a same machine ???

and the -t argument is not even documented (if I’m not mistaken …)

  • Did you ever tried rpi-clone ?
  • what’s your 2cent about it ?
  • does rpi-clone sda promt you to confirm the destination ?
  • do know some thing else ?
  • is it possible to output the backup as a file ?


Thanks.

  1. Backup that can be taken while the system is running. ↩︎

  • czardestructo@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Put the sdcard in a Linux box with a GUI

    Step one: shrink the image size use gparted, re-size the main partition to as small as possible

    Step two: run fdisk to find out the last used sector. Command: sudo fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0

    Step three: get the ‘end’ sector from the last partition and enter it into the dd command below as ‘count’. Run the dd command with a stop at the last used sector and correct bytes per sector set: sudo dd bs=512 count=12281855 if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/home/pi/Azle.iso status=progress