How to backup a big SD card?

1

I have a SD card with 32 GB (with Raspian on it, for my Raspberry Pi). No I installed everything and want to backup the content, so that I can quickly restore it (if the card fails) to another SD card.

The mighty Internet suggested Win32DiskImager. It works well, but the file is huge (nearly 32GB).

Compressing it with 7zip works (compression rate of 80% till now, but only 57% compressed after 2 hours). Is there a better way to backup and restore the entire content? There is only about 3 GB of data used after all.

Burkhard

Posted 2015-09-16T18:25:40.437

Reputation: 115

Connect both cards to your pc, clone one card to another using the cloning software of your choice ( apparently not Win32DiskImager ), then rejoice in your cloned card. – Ramhound – 2015-09-16T18:28:50.650

Well, I could do that, but it wouldn't help if the actual sd-card fails. I want to have the state 0 (now) in a small file, so that I only need to backup some folders and be safe. – Burkhard – 2015-09-16T18:37:05.573

That is how backups work, you take continuous backups, right now you are creating an image of the entire card which as expected is 32GB since you included the free space. – Ramhound – 2015-09-16T18:38:54.380

I'm confused. When I did my first backup (image) of a 500GB drive, it did (fortunately) not take 500GB. Why would that be different here? – Burkhard – 2015-09-16T18:46:01.300

Answers

0

I use the HDD Raw Copy Tool from HDDGrugu.com for my Rasp Pi imaging needs on my Windows PC.

The reason I mention it specifically is because it works well (for me anyway), and it supports saving/loading images in the imgc format, which is a compressed IMG file (disk image).

Note: I have no affiliation with the tool or the company mentioned, aside from being a user.

Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007

Posted 2015-09-16T18:25:40.437

Reputation: 103 763

Asked: 2015-09-16T18:25:40.437

Viewed: 308 times

Active: 2015-09-16T19:35:14.127