Raspberry Pi Backup

14 June 2014

Disk Backup

Create a disk image of the SD card using Mac OS X.

Connect the SD disk to the host machine and search for the disk, diskutil list.

bubbamac:~ bubba$ diskutil list
    /dev/disk0
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *256.1 GB   disk0
       1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS OSX SSD                 255.2 GB   disk0s2
       3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
    /dev/disk1
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *3.9 GB     disk1
       1:                WINDOWS_FAT_32 BOOT                 62.9 MB    disk1s1
       2:                       Linux                        33.6 MB    disk1s2

The disk to be cloned is /dev/disk1. Initialize the clone by specifying the source disk and destination file.

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/Desktop/2014-06-14_raspi.dmg

The imaging process takes some time (about 20 min for 4GB). The command line tool does not have a progress indicator, but will display a success message when complete.

Writing the Disk Image

Insert the destination SD card. Using diskutil list, find the destination card.

Unmount the card.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Format the card.

sudo newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/disk1

Similar to the disk image creation, specify the source and destination for the image.

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/2014-06-14_raspi.dmg of=/dev/disk1

Writing the image to the card will take a lot longer than it did to create the image. It will probably take a few hours to complete.