Raspberry Pi backup using fsarchiver and other tricks

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 06:56:17 +0000

So I ran into a few issues using the dd image backup I referenced prior Raspberry Pi 3 SDCard backup

The Image is very large even though the data was not. For example on a 32GB SD card I was getting a 12GB file. I only have 3GB of data! so that was a bummer.
When it comes time to recover, I have to expand the gz image file to a full 32GB to then image it onto another SD device. There’s tricks around this I’m sure but still.
Since dd was reading 100% of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0) even with compression it took a LONG time to create the image. 20 minutes or so. Since I’m backing up a live system this was a real issue.

I did manage to figure out how to create a partial image if your partition sizes were smaller than the actual device - This seemed to work but it still was storing 6.6GB of data which was over double what I actually had:

RPi on kenops

Raspberry Pi backup using fsarchiver and other tricks