I would like to make manual backups of an SD card as a disk image so that it can be easily recreated when needed. I’d like to keep a few versions in case there is a problem I didn’t know about, it can be rolled back.

How can I do this incrementally, or with de-duplication, so that I don’t have to keep full copies of the complete SD card? It’s very big but most of the content won’t be changing much.

It’s for MiyooCFW ROM which is on FAT 32-formatted micro SD card.

Thanks for your help! Also let me know if I am going about the problem in a wrong way.

  • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    2 months ago

    If it’s a filesystem, it can be backed up using BorgBackup. There are a few different clients but I personally use Vorta on Linux.

    • danA
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 months ago

      +1 Borgbackup is great, and its deduplication works very well. Vorta works well, and there’s also GNOME Pika which has a very simple UI. For servers, I use Borgmatic.

    • RedSquadCampFollower@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      @tkk13909@sopuli.xyz @dan@upvote.au

      Borg backup has insane deduping. The first time I used it I thought it was broken because of how much smaller the backup was compared to the original. I used it with vorta GUI.

      I am not sure how to combine the task of making a disk image with backing up with borg either on the command line or via one of the GUIs?

      • chameleon@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        2 months ago

        Easiest way would be to use borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 '/home/user/sdcardbackup::{now}' /dev/sdX (which I copied from the examples in the documentation). I’m not sure if Vorta has a way to activate --read-special but I suspect not; you can most likely still use it to make the repo and manage archives inside of it though.

        Backing up from a command/stdin might also be relevant as an alternative, since that lets you back up more or less anything.

        • danA
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 months ago

          Wow I love this - I never thought of directly backing up block devices like that.