If you’re using Raspberry Pi, you might know the famous command line utility dd
, useful to write a Raspbian image to a blank SD card (cf. http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup).
You can also use this tool to do backup of the whole disk, but it has two drawbacks :
- when you copy the whole disk, the image is as big as the disk, even if the is lots of empty space on it.
- when you restore the backup you need a disk at least as big as the original one.
Those two disadvantages lead me to find a solution to make backups smaller and more versatile. The solution I’ll describe here is an adaptation of Ubuntu’s documentation : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR and have been tested on Ubutnu 14.04.