RaspberryPi SD Card Backup

A Bash script to create an image file of the SD Card in a Raspberry Pi for backup purposes. The image file is stored on a mounted backup location, such as a NAS share, and then the script uses PiShrink to compress the image file to save space. The image file is then GZipped for additional space-saving.

Setting it up

Download the script, made it executable, update and make sure the variables work for your Raspberry Pi per the comments in the script, and then run it.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tronyx/rpi-sdcard-backup/master/rpi-sdcard-backup.sh
chmod a+x rpi-sdcard-backup.sh

Prerequisites

You will need to check the mount point of the SD Card as well just in case it is not the same as what I have listed below. You can check this by running:

sudo lsblk

Mine looks like this:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0     179:0    0 29.8G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0 43.2M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0 29.8G  0 part /

So my SD Card is /dev/mmcblk0 for the creation of the image. I attempt to get this information automatically with variables in the script, but you should check that it is correct before running it.

Example Cronjob

Here is the cronjob that I use to run the script every Sunday morning at 5am:

## Run the rpi-sdcard-backup.sh script every Sunday at 5am
0 5 * * 0 /home/tronyx/scripts/rpi-sdcard-backup.sh > /var/log/rpi-sdcard-backup.log

The > /var/log/rpi-sdcard-backup.log at the end allows me to log the output of the script so I can check it if there was an issue while it ran overnight.