IT

How to Clone Your Raspberry Pi SD Card for Foolproof Backup

Author: Whitson Gordon / Source: howtogeek.com

Raspberry Pis can be fickle. If you’ve ever gotten a corrupt SD card from a power outage, bad cable, overclocking, or other issue, you know how annoying it can be to start from scratch. But we can fix that.

How This Works

I’ve had this happen all too often, and I eventually figured out a good solution.

Once I set up my Pi project exactly how I want it, I just use Win32 Disk Imager on Windows to clone an image of its SD card onto my PC. There I keep it, safely, until something goes wrong with my Pi. When that happens, I can just re-clone that image to the SD card, overwriting the broken or corrupt version, and I’m be back up and running in no time. (If you don’t use Windows, you can do something similar on Linux with the dd command.) It’s so simple, every Raspberry Pi user should do it.

This works best with those Pi projects that require initial setup and then just run in the background, doing their thing. If you ever make changes to the Pi project, you’ll need to re-clone the image, but with a lot of projects, this is perfect. For example, I use this technique for my two Raspberry Pis running Kodi—if either ever goes down, I can just re-clone my personal image, and the boxes are back up and running in no time, grabbing up-to-date library data from my home server and MySQL database as if nothing ever happened.

And as a bonus, you can more easily share your Raspberry Pi projects by just writing your cloned image out to a new SD card (or sharing the image itself).

Here’s how to do it.