Create a backup of your Raspberry Pi SD card using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and restore when you need

Doesn't cover proper backup strategy, just making an image of the SD card.

It directly covers recovery from catastrophic failure or corruption of the SD card. It could be argued that is the most important backup recovery use case.

For selective recovery of files that were accidentally deleted or overwritten, the backup SD card could be mounted via an SD-to-USB adapter (or on a second Linux machine) and the file copied over.

For either use case, one could use several backup cards and rotate them to facilitate several generations of recovery. Rob, what else would you consider essential ingredients of a proper backup strategy?

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Robert Riches 
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net 
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

Checking of file creation/modification time stamps and saving a copy of the new version of the file (after checking it against the currently saved version). For specified parts of the file hierarchy like /home and /etc or for the whole file system excluding locations like /tmp and /var and remote disks.

IOW, use rsync to do the job, running it from a script that:

1) mounts the backup card (or checks that its mounted) 2) runs rsync to backup the parts of the filing system yo want to save 3) unmounts the backup card 4) runs fsck against the card to check it for errors

I've been doing backups this way for several years. The main benefit is speed because rsync does the minimum amount of work to make the backed up set of files the same as the live set, i.e. the first backup to a new SD card will be slow because everything is copied. After that things are a lot faster because it only removes deleted files and copies new and modified ones. It may take a little initial fiddling to get the script doing exactly what you want but after that backups will be quick and easy.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |