
Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Second Edition
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It happens to everyone at one point or another—you've put hours into perfecting your Raspbian installation, setting up applications, and hacking away at clever code when out of nowhere your cat/dog/next-of-kin swoops down on your keyboard and triggers the self-destruct mechanism from the Erasing the Pi should it fall into the wrong hands section in Chapter 5, Taking Your Pi Off-road.
Not to worry Agent, backing up an SD card is quite simple as long as you've got the required disk space to store it.
We'll be making a complete mirror image of your SD card. The data will be stored in a single file that will be the same size as that of your SD card.
Win32DiskImager-0.9.5-install.exe
at the time of writing).Backing up an SD card in Windows
img
.Once your image backup has completed successfully, you can compress it to save quite a bit of disk space. Just right-click on the image file and select Send to, then click on Compressed (zipped) folder.
To restore your SD card from a backup image, simply point Win32 Disk Imager to your image file, and click on the Write button.
Win32 Disk Imager is also used to write the operating system images available for download at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads directly to the SD card without using NOOBS.
We'll be making a complete mirror image of your SD card. The data will be stored in a single compressed file, which should result in a smaller size than that of your SD card. The steps to be followed for a data backup are:
/Applications/Utilities
on the Mac).diskutil list
to obtain a readout of all connected storage devices.[disk]
with the IDENTIFIER field of your SD card:$ diskutil unmountdisk [disk]
agent_sdcard.img.gz
on your desktop. Type the following command, but replace [disk]
with the IDENTIFIER field of your SD card (note the letter r in front of disk):$ sudo dd if=/dev/r[disk] bs=4m | gzip > ~/Desktop/agent_sdcard.img.gz
sudo
is allowed to start. The backup process doesn't produce much output as it runs, but a status report can be produced by pressing Ctrl + T in the Terminal
window.Backing up an SD card in Mac OS X
To restore your SD card from a backup image, repeat the previous steps but use this command instead at step 7:
$ gzip -dc ~/Desktop/agent_sdcard.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/r[disk] bs=4m
If you type the wrong disk you could potentially overwrite your Mac's internal hard drive without any warning. Do triple check!
The restore image method is also used to write the operating system images available for download at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads directly to the SD card without using NOOBS.
We'll be making a complete mirror image of your SD card. The data will be stored in a single compressed file, which should result in a smaller size than that of your SD card.
sudo lsblk -f
to obtain a readout of all connected storage devices.vfat
and one ext4
entry under FSTYPE
(there will be two of each type if we installed Raspbian through NOOBS).NAME
(sdb
in the screenshot).NAME
have a MOUNTPOINT
listed, you should unmount it first. Use the following command, but replace [mountpoint]
with the mountpoint of your partition:$ sudo umount [mountpoint]
agent_sdcard.img.gz
in your home directory. Type the following command, but replace [disk]
with the NAME
of your SD card:$ sudo dd if=/dev/[disk] bs=4M | gzip > ~/agent_sdcard.img.gz
sudo pkill -USR1 dd
in another terminal
console.Backing up an SD card in Linux
To restore your SD card from a backup image, repeat the previous steps but use this command instead at step 7:
$ gzip -dc ~/agent_sdcard.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/[disk] bs=4M
If you type the wrong disk you could potentially overwrite your computer's internal hard drive without any warning. Do triple check!
The restore image method is also used to write the operating system images available for download at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads directly to the SD card without using NOOBS.
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