How To Back Up a Raspberry Pi SD Card

2023-03-22 | By Maker.io Staff

Lost data can be frustrating and cost quite a bit of effort, time, and money in the worst case. ‎Unfortunately, these mishaps happen for various reasons, whether due to a hardware fault, ‎power outage, or simple user error. That’s why creating regular backups and storing them on ‎redundant physical machines or storage devices is crucial, as everyone who’s experienced data ‎loss at one point might agree. Luckily, creating a full backup of a Raspberry Pi’s SD card is a ‎fast and straightforward procedure. This article outlines why you should create backups and two ‎ways of accomplishing the task so that you can be on the safe side regardless of your Linux skill ‎level.

Why Worry about Backups?

Data loss can have significant effects, depending on where the problem occurs. In most cases, ‎however, the problem will luckily not be quite so dramatic. However, a Raspberry Pi’s SD card ‎might hold valuable data, such as a custom program or script that took hours to write or family ‎photos if the Pi is used as a regular computer.

Most people will run the operating system off a standard, consumer-grade SD card, which was ‎not made for this task. Like USB sticks, these storage devices were not primarily meant to run ‎an OS. That’s due to the operating system regularly shuffling files around and writing many ‎entries into log files and other temporary locations, which may wear out the storage modules on ‎an SD card or USB thumb drive. Therefore, hardware failure is just a matter of time, and it will ‎occur with a greater probability and in a shorter time than it would with a storage solution made ‎for running an OS, such as an SSD or HDD.

Creating Backups Using the Desktop Environment

Suppose you use your Raspberry Pi with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. In that case, you can ‎utilize the Raspbian operating system’s built-in SD Card Copier utility program, which lets you ‎select the source and target devices before making an exact copy of all the contents on the ‎source SD card and storing it on the target device. To start, plug in an external storage medium - ‎for example, a USB thumb drive or a second SD card connected via an external card reader - ‎and open the utility program from the desktop’s program menu.

How To Back Up a Raspberry Pi SD Card

Then, select the correct source and target devices in the UI.:

How To Back Up a Raspberry Pi SD Card

The tool will then copy the entire SD card with all its partitions to the selected target device.

How To Back Up a Raspberry Pi SD Card

Backing Up a Headless Raspberry Pi

Many makers use the Raspberry Pi without a keyboard, mouse, and display attached. However, ‎that doesn’t mean you can’t back up the SD card, as there’s a handy command line tool that can ‎create exact copies of all disks attached to a Linux-based system, such as the Pi. To get started, ‎connect the external target device to the Raspberry Pi and then use lsblk to list all drives and ‎their partitions:

How To Back Up a Raspberry Pi SD Card

Look for the external thumb drive or SD card reader you want to use as the target device. ‎Typically, you can use the name or size of the storage medium to identify the correct one. Do ‎the same for the source device (the system’s main SD card) and write down both devices’ ‎names. Make sure to use the disk name and not one of the partitions, as highlighted in the image ‎above. Next, run the dd tool using the following parameters:

Copy Code

sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/sda status=progress

Doing so copies the entire source disk to the target disk, including all partitions and data. In my ‎case, the destination disk has less capacity than the source. However, that’s not a problem since ‎the Raspberry Pi OS only takes up around 3GB on the SD card. However, you should always ‎use a sufficiently large destination drive when creating backups to prevent data loss or corruption.

Summary

Regularly backing up any computer’s storage media is a good idea, as hardware failure can ‎always occur, and with a more or less recent backup, you at least don’t lose all your data. ‎However, backups are critical when working with storage media not made for constant use, ‎such as an SD card or a USB stick. On the Raspberry Pi, you can choose from various options ‎when creating full backups of the system’s main SD card. First, you can use the graphical ‎desktop environment, which can create backups with only a few clicks. On the other hand, the ‎command-line tool dd is particularly practical when creating backups of headless systems, such ‎as media servers. Whichever option you use, you end up with an exact copy of the original SD ‎card, meaning no restoring is necessary should the original card fail. The copy is fully bootable ‎and contains all partitions, programs, files, and other data of the original. Finally, testing the ‎created backup right away is recommended by trying to boot the Pi using the backup device.