I only use my Raspberry PI5 to run a Nodered home automation system.
Now that the system is very stable I would like to create a backup sd card,.in case the sd card fails or becomes corrupted. I would prefer to create the clone on my Windows 10 laptop which is used for development. Having read several articles and looked at several youtubes I am none the wiser as to which tools/procedure to use. Win32 disk imager and Etcher are often mentioned but with variable feedback on the results. Any advice gratefully received.
I'm using Win32 disk imager to make a copy of the sd card, works great.
However it's important that you always test restoring a backup.
I had ones that a 16GB card from manufacturer A was a couple of bytes smaller then a 16GB from manufacturer B with the result that Win32 diskimager came with the "not enough space" error.
That is a common problem. I always shrink the last partition a few MB on SD cards so that the image will fit on a slightly smaller card. That implies that the imager understands partions and does not try to restore the empty space at the end. I use CloneZilla which does do that. In addition it only saves used space on the SD card, and it compresses it, so the image (on a hard drive) is smaller than the card itself.
If you get fed up of waiting for all the gigabytes of empty disk space to backup, you might like to look at this linux command line tool using rsync.
I don't currently backup my SD cards so I am not sure how you restore from the backup, but it has the advantages of being able to backup a running system (to a network storage directory?) and, so they say, restorable to a smaller SD card than the original.
It seems that utility writes directly to another card, which is mounted in a usb SD card reader.
I notice that the one you linked to has not been updated in 5 years, so whether it still works I don't know. I think there are other forks of it, so maybe there is one that is maintained.
Rpi-clone is a command line tool that runs on the Pi.
I recently used it to clone my sd card to an ssd.
Worked flawlessly.
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You are right, The original is now abandoned. Instead refer to Jeff Geerling at https://github.com/geerlingguy/rpi-clone
I've updated my post with the correct URL.
Thanks everyone for your help. I have now successfully created a clone of my 32gb official PI SD card using win32 disk imager. To avoid the potential problems with slightly different cards I used an official original card for the copy. It worked perfectly first time, first creating the .img file on windows 10 pro and then writing the image to a new identical card. For info, Cool Components are currently selling the official cards at a much reduced price. They delivered in 24 hours using 1st class post. Website is Cool Components - Raspberry Pi A2-Class SD Cards (32GB & 64GB)
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I don't know that you can assume that all official cards will always be identical. I imagine that they may not always use the same supplier.
Being paranoid I don't use the pre-programmed cards, or if I do then I re-burn them. I am not sure how one can be confident that the card has not been tampered with.
These cards are blank, there is nothing pre loaded. They appear identical to the one supplied with my PI 5 at the end of last year. They worked perfectly for me and are very well priced. Take your point though that PI may change the sourcing of the cards and get back into the very small size difference that causes issues with Win32 Disk Imager.
I use RaspiBackup for my collection of Pis, it's saved me numerous times and is well maintained with regular updates RaspiBackup
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