Skip to content


android  notes  hal  aidl  hidl  kernel  arduino  esp32  book  management  c/c++  arm  freertos  stm32  debug  sysview  jetson  linux  vuejs  nodejs  electron  chromium  dmm  hardware  raspberry-pi  camera  i2c  ffmpeg  performance  v4l2  picamera  stream  hls  dash  python  h264  mjpeg  ros  jinja  javascript  mkdocs  markdown  encryption  asm  rtt  swv  virtual-machine  docker  hyper-v  serial  yocto  gnss  lidar 


Raspberry Pi »

Backup and Restore SDCard content

In systems running on an SDCard like Raspberry Pi, it is usually needed to backup the SDCard content to a file which will be restored later in case something wrong happens. There are some tools to help doing the backup and recovery.

#raspberry-pi  

Last update: 2022-05-07

Table of Content

Win32 Disk Imager#

Win32 Disk Images is a popular and famous application on Windows to write a raw disk image to a removable device or backup a removable device to a raw image file.

Raw image mode

Raw image mode means all bits of the device are copied to the image file, therefore the size of the backup file is equal to the device’s total size. This method will take a long time to complete, depending on the size of the storage device.

Download it from win32diskimager and run it as administrative right.

Backup#

  1. Select the Image File to save the SD Card content
  2. Select the source Device
  3. Click on Read

Win32 Disk Imager: save device to image

Restore#

  1. Select the Image File of the SD Card content
  2. Select the target Device
  3. Click on Write

Win32 Disk Imager: restore from image to device

Acronis True Image#

Acronis True Image is an application that provides data protection for personal users including, backup, archive, access and recovery for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android operating systems.

This application is a commercial product, try it for free before purchasing a copy.

Backup and Restore#

Acronis will not back up empty space on the SD Card, it only saves the useful data, therefore the backup progress is much faster than dumping all bits and the file size is smaller.

It also has incremental backup mode which only writes modified data, compared to the previous backup, therefore it can save a lot of disk space.

The restore process is as simple as the backup. There are buttons and guide to help to do those actions:

Acronis True Image: backup/restore disk

Conflict with Paragon Linux File Systems for Windows

Paragon Linux File Systems for Windows is a powerful system service tool which gives users full access to Linux volumes within Windows. However, Acronis may conflict with mounted partitions as Acronis does have its own reading linux partitions engine.

To avoid conflicts when backing up a Linux partition, such as infinite waiting, user has to unmount the partition and gives full control to Acronis.

Unmount partition in Paragon Linux File Systems

Comments