Think of hot-plugging or hot-swapping of external drives to avoid any system downtime.Įven if a digital picture frame is not a mission-critical tool, it’s good practice to have a near current backup image of your SD-card. Whenever the word “hot” is used in software it refers to an operation that is being conducted while the computer system is running. Why hot-cloning can introduce discipline in the backing up process It’s painless if you follow my instructions below. Save yourself the trouble and make regular back-ups. If the power supply dwindles, you just get a new one.īut if the SD-card fails, you either have a saved image of the SD-card that you flash on your replacement card or you go through the more or less tedious routine of reinstalling everything from scratch.Īnd sometimes, you may have made a lot of modifications that you don’t remember or that are difficult to recreate. I’ve seen SD-cards in a daily operation lasting five years, and others break after a few months. The SD-card and the power supply of your Raspberry Pi are likely the only components that may potentially break.

Why not backing up your SD-card is not an option I will also explain some limitations of database-intensive applications where hot-cloning may not be the best choice. In this article, I will explain to you step by step how to set up the hot-cloning using a compression algorithm, how to restore an image, and how to automate this task. This means you can back up e.g., the SD-card of your digital picture frame, which is operational 24/7, to your regular computer.Īnd you can even automate it to make it happen in the background once a week and keep only the last three backups. Hot-cloning allows you to make a fully bootable copy of a remotely running system. This is where hot-cloning comes into play. However, if your Raspberry Pi is built into a device like a digital picture frame and it is difficult to access because you have to take it down from the wall, unplug the power and try to remove the SD card with freshly clipped fingernails, then you just don’t do it often, if at all.

Making a backup of the SD card of your Raspberry Pi typically involves powering down the system, taking out the card, putting it into a card reader on your regular computer, and then entering the commands for backing up the disk.

Backup raspi sd card