imgclone

This program can be used to create a backup of your Raspberry Pi SD card while it's active. It does this in the same way as the official piclone program (https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/piclone). Main differences are:

• Command line based, so it can be used to automatically create backups
• It creates a backup to a disk image file (.img). So you can create multiple backups on 1 external SD card, USB drive, USB hard disk or even a network shared drive.
• Result backup will only be a few percent larger than the used disk space of your Raspberry SD card!

Installation

On the raspberry you open a terminal window and type following commands:

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install gcc make git
• git clone https://github.com/tom-2015/imgclone.git
• cd imgclone
• make
• sudo make install

Usage

Attach external storage device (USB, Hard disk or mount a Samba share). cd to the drive:

• cd /media/pi/<external drive> Start backup:
• imgclone -d mybackup.img

To compress the image AFTER it is made use the -gzip or -bzip2 arguments. Show copy progress with the -p argument.

backup to network drive

Make sure you have a NAS or other Samba shared drive in your network, then just mount it:

• mkdir /tmp/backup
• sudo mount -t cifs //<share_drive_ip>/<share_folder_name> /tmp/backup
• imgclone -d /tmp/backup/mybackup.img

restore backup

You can use standard procedure (dd or win32diskimager) to write the .img file to a (new) SD card. Insert to your Raspberry and start it! Run sudo raspi-config to expand the file system of the root partition to fill the entire SD card. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/README.md