SD Card Copier

I have a Raspberry Pi 4b with the latest Buster Desktop running some weather station software on a 400GB SD.

I have used sudo raspi-config and set it to boot from a USB disk if present.

I want to transfer the image from the SD card to a USB Disk and do away with the SD Card

Normally I would shut the Pi down and use Apple Pi Baker to clone the SD card and then write the image to the USB Disk.

This will take some time and leave some weather data missing.

If I used the SD Card Copies app found under Accessories in the Desktop Menu can this copy the live SD to the USB Disk?

Reply to
Simple Simon
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I have no idea what that app does, but copying live filesystems is tricky.

I'd think about downloading a fresh image and writing it via dd to the USB stick. Then use rsync to mirror your running system to the USB. That way you get a known-bootable partition structure on the USB followed by the file updates from your running copy. The only thing it might not copy is files that were being written at the time of the rsync.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

Yes I have done so on a number of systems It is designed for exactly this purpose

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Reply to
alister

Ok - many thanks - I will give it a go when the new USB disk arrives

Reply to
Simple Simon

BTDT several times.

It depends ... as always. The system needs to be pretty quiet (*), nothing really doing any work. Then a "dd" followed by an "fsck" on the destination usually gives the desired result.

(*) Of course, doing this on a busy web server may not work

Josef

Reply to
Josef Moellers

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