What is the recommended way to back up a user's *.img? I ask b/c I crashed the OS (Debian 11 Xfce) after a number of hours by upgrading via Synaptic -- don't know which of the upgrade group did the damage. It was a major pain to go back through everything I had done.

 

I tried the very nice script "image-backup" from the image-utils developed by user RonR on the RPi Forum, but it complains about the wrong Partition config. Is there a method that is known to work?

 

TIA

Take the SD card out and put it into another machine. Copy the whole card as an image. To restore you just copy it back. On Linux I would use dd for this:

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=backup.img bs=1M status=progress

making sure you have the right dev. It should not be mounted while you do this.

On Windows... Balena Etcher?

Thanks for answering this, much appreciated!

 

I'm on MX Linux (Debian 11 base) and knew about dd. The nice part about the RPi software I mentioned is that a backup or copy can be made directly from the running system, saving a lot of futzing around. If I can't work that out, I will first try rsync/grsync for an incremental backup--but not sure the copy would be functional.

This thread sounds oddly familiar (but I'm not going to bother searching).

 

Anyway, I encourage you to consider configuration management as a separate concept to 'imaging the entire OS as a backup' as there are a couple problems with the latter approach:

• It wastes a lot of space.
• Upgrading in-place between major OS versions is not (and has never been) supported in Armbian, so sooner or later you will probably have to re-install everything anyway.

In the configuration management space there are things like Ansible (and many, many others) in fact just searching up that term should give you plenty of ideas.

Um, OK. I have no interest in upgrading in-place and can easily avoid "wasting space," just want to protect development stages.

 

But for people who do, your advice sounds like it would be useful.