I have built my armbian system on a Renegade board, and I need to back up the entire system so that I can copy it to other sdcards. I tried to use Win32DiskImager.exe to read out the system, but the size of the image read out is much larger than the space occupied by the system, which is basically equal to the size of the card. Any good suggestions?

With MS Windows you can also try https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager

With Linux I'd simply go for dd if to create an image from an sdcard.

When you install Armbian..you did see the image was compressed .as it's installing it's resizing for the sd.....some are larger then the sd but are compressed.....

keep us updated on your journey....)

 

On Windows and I'm not sure if there is a good method, but you can always compress the image.  This will not help if you want to fit it on a smaller sd card.
On Linux you can resize the image to a smaller image by removing unused space, and it can then be expanded to fit the size of your sd card. This is an old tutorial but it works:  https://web.archive.org/web/20200602173912/https://softwarebakery.com/shrinking-images-on-linux

The Armbian images shrink the filesystem down to a minimal footprint that then expand to the max of the sdcard on first boot.     You're cloning the image after it's been expanded from first boot stage

 

You'll want to shrink the root file system and the partition before imagine.

 

 Rather than making a golden image, using the Armbian build tool and the customize image hooks to install your packages would be a more appropriate solution 

None of the above solutions work for Windows.

 

However I found a way to clone the entire drive to a compressed image file and have successfully restored it and booted back into Armbian.

 

AOMEI Backupper Free -> Backup -> Disk Backup (bottom is folder to store backup, top is the sdcard/drive you want to select to backup)