Raspberry Pi OpenPlotter Making a System BackUp

I recommend to make a copy of your system when you are happy with the configuration. SD cards are usually reliable now days but like any thing electronic they can fail. Having a copy of your set up allows you to easily replace your system, just swap your failing SD for the backup SD.

Put a Fat32 formatted SD card in a USB SD card reader/writer and plug it into your Pi USB port.

Read how to format a SD card with Fat32 Here scroll down to the format section.

To start the process open a Terminal window from Accessories menu.

Terminal window ready to go.

In the open a Terminal window type: df -h

The out put of the df -h command showing the list of mounted devices

You will get a list of mounted devices. Check the device name, in my case /dev/sdc1. Ignore the last character that is a number, in my case 1. As can be seen this card has been formatted with a Volume name of SITE.

In the screen capture its listed as /dev/sdc1  120G 128k 120G /media/pi/SITE  which makes sense because its a 128Gb SD card and has 128k used, and has 120Gb free.

Open SD Card Copier from Accessories menu.

Selecting the SD Card copy tool from the Accessories menu

In Copy From Device select the internal SD card /dev/mmcblk0
In Copy To Device select the device that matches the device from the terminal list, in my case /dev/sdc

Do not check New Partition UUIDs or it may not work correctly on your copy.

The /dev/mmcblk0  selected as copy from device and the /dev/sdc selected as copy to device

Press Start,

If your happy with your choices press the yes button

Getting the new SD card ready for the copy 

Just about ready to start the copy of data

Copy under way the first four partitions went by quickly

Your done 

After waiting 10 to 15 minutes you are done. I shutdown and remove the SD card carrier. Now put the copied SD into a safe place.


If you do not have an USB card reader/writer you can use the same method you would use to write an image to a new card.  Here is a link to the Raspberry Pi org site detailing how to use your Windows PC to install operating system images. Here is how to do it using a MAC.
-----------------------------------------------------


If after you are up and running and have made some changes and need to back up your system again you can write over the SD card you have made as a backup (as above). The first step ( df -h command) is the same but the out put on the screen looks different. The steps are the same, you are still copying to the sdc (SD Card). You will still copy to /dev/sdc

The window below is the output of the df -h command, showing the different partitions, of the same sd card (sdc).

The df -h command out put on the screen showing the different sdc partitions