Remote backup of SD card for an Orange Pi?

[Geoffrey Schaller]

I have a pair of Orange Pi 3's acting as redundant PiHoles on my home network. After a bit of tinkering and configuring, I have them set up the way I want, and would like to keep them that way.

 

Of course, a good backup plan is essential to this.  Looking online, I found Image-Utils for Raspberry Pi, but that is limited in support for only the Raspbian OS.

 

Is there a good system out there to make a cloneable image of an SD card in an Orange Pi, either from the Pi itself to a remote source (NFS mount, etc.), or from a remote source pulling from the Pi?  I'd like to schedule this as a CRON job, so that in the event of a hardware failure, I can just restore the image to a new SD card and deploy it with minimal loss.

 

Thank you!

[Werner]

Maybe this helps? https://forum.armbian.com/topic/29427-shrink-backup-a-tool-for-backing-up-sbcs/

[eselarm]

Most SBC backup tools I have seen are based on rsync and they operate then on/with Ext4 filesystem. Is fine when you don't have complex servers and databases running. I am not sure about pihole, but I saw that by default it keeps a 1 year history so a database file of about 1GB. I am not sure what happens to integrity of such a file on the target if during copy/rsync the source file also changes. AFAIK databases have their ways to handle it, when power-loss or so, but not sure.

If you want to be sure, use Btrfs as filesystem, then you can make atomic snapshots and use those for source of rsync or use:  btrfs send -p <old snapshotnumber> <snapshot number>| ssh <remote_host> btrfs receive <backup folder>. That is the basic manual option. Complete tool is btrbk, it is standard in Debian repo, see https://digint.ch/btrbk/index.html docs of author. You still need some partition and bootloader handling I think. Or assume that a total crash is rare so only backup to NAS or so and reconstruct manually if you need a new SD-card or so or want to copy thing so eMMC of the OPi3.