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Backup


JerryMX
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What is the recommended way to back up a user's *.img? I ask b/c I crashed the OS (Debian 11 Xfce) after a number of hours by upgrading via Synaptic -- don't know which of the upgrade group did the damage. It was a major pain to go back through everything I had done.

 

I tried the very nice script "image-backup" from the image-utils developed by user RonR on the RPi Forum, but it complains about the wrong Partition config. Is there a method that is known to work?

 

TIA

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Take the SD card out and put it into another machine. Copy the whole card as an image. To restore you just copy it back. On Linux I would use dd for this:

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=backup.img bs=1M status=progress

making sure you have the right dev. It should not be mounted while you do this.

On Windows... Balena Etcher?

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Thanks for answering this, much appreciated!

 

I'm on MX Linux (Debian 11 base) and knew about dd. The nice part about the RPi software I mentioned is that a backup or copy can be made directly from the running system, saving a lot of futzing around. If I can't work that out, I will first try rsync/grsync for an incremental backup--but not sure the copy would be functional.

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This thread sounds oddly familiar (but I'm not going to bother searching).

 

Anyway, I encourage you to consider configuration management as a separate concept to 'imaging the entire OS as a backup' as there are a couple problems with the latter approach:

  • It wastes a lot of space.
  • Upgrading in-place between major OS versions is not (and has never been) supported in Armbian, so sooner or later you will probably have to re-install everything anyway.

In the configuration management space there are things like Ansible (and many, many others) in fact just searching up that term should give you plenty of ideas.

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