backups for SD card disk image? that don't take up tonnes of space and can be rolled back?

Linux@lemmy.ml – 23 points – 3 months ago

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.

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@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?

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.

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