Complete Backup of a Running Pi

I’ve recently been playing with using LIRC on a #PiZero to control RGB Garden Lights.

I wanted to try out controlling GU10 RGB Kitchen lights on another PiZero but there wasn’t a way to make a live DD copy of the running system without powering it down and brining it back indoors.

So, without any expection that it would work, I went about doing a live DD image backup from the running PiZero in the garden across WiFi to my main Win10 PC.

I always set up my Pi with SMB so all I had to do was VNC into Pi and mount one of my windows shared folders on the Pi

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=mywinlogon,password=mywinpassword //win8/shared /mnt/backup

sudo pv -tpreb /dev/mmcblk0 | sudo dd bs=64M of=/mnt/backup/pi.img

and then went out for the day (as it took about 3 hrs on a 8GB system)

When I came back, I used Win32DiskImager to simply put the image onto as SD card, put it into another PiZero and up it booted 🙂

 

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2 Responses

  1. Peter Garner says:

    I like the sound of a remote backup. Have you RPi-clone for local backups? It makes life really simple .

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