Cloning SD Card, 3 partitions? Consumes too much space?

[godvader]

Hi guys I have already read couple of articles about cloning a SD Card of a raspberry pi. I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 B with Raspian.


I took out the SD card from the Pi connected it to my Windows PC. There I saw 3 new drives. 2 of them unreadable. One of them readable and called "RECOVERY". I cloned the E drive to a new image. And right now I have 2 questions:

- Did I successfully clone my pi? What happened to those unreadable partitions? I am going to buy two new raspberry Pi's and I want to make sure when I use this image I can easily use the setup I created in my first Pi.

- I am using a 16GB SD card and I only installed one app. Other than that it is all stock Raspian. But my image file is close to 15GB. I am pretty sure my SD card isn't that full. How can I fix this? I wanna be able to upload this image file to cloud and easily access it from everywhere but 15GBs is just way too big

Open to recommendations. Thanks in advance!

[KLL]

copy the NOOBS RECOVERY partition ( only ) would be useless
but as you talk about a 15GB image file;
a image read write would CLONE the full SD card and should work.

one tool to do that easy would be
RASPBIAN desktop menu /Accessories / SD Card Copier
( but you would need a external SD card "reader" with the NEW SDcard (8 or 16 GB )
yes, if you use now a 16GB but only installed one OS and only installed one program additionally
the content might fit on a 8GB SD card.

using a OLD setup is questionable, minimum you should do a
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
first.

how many OS you installed with NOOBS / you frequently switch between?
if you only run ONE, like RASPBIAN
better download RASPBIAN image ( ONLY, not NOOBS )
and burn to SD card. ( using tools like ETCHER or Win32Diskimager )
- - it,s faster ( in boot ),
- - not confuse you about so many partitions
- - and not wastes 1GB SD card space if you have used full NOOBS.

for the 15GB (?16?) image file and upload to cloud?
- its mostly useless to keep that old images, esp. if it not really contains WORK.
( better just backup you work (files ) ( to USB stick, PC SAMBA share, dropbox...)
- you can ZIP it down to ?about 4GB? but still too big for online storage, PC harddisk ok
- you could have problems with restore to other 16GB cards. ( only same card or BIGGER (32GB) sure )

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi guys I have already read couple of articles about cloning a SD Card of a raspberry pi. I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 B with Raspian.


I took out the SD card from the Pi connected it to my Windows PC. There I saw 3 new drives. 2 of them unreadable. One of them readable and called "RECOVERY". I cloned the E drive to a new image. And right now I have 2 questions:

- Did I successfully clone my pi? What happened to those unreadable partitions? I am going to buy two new raspberry Pi's and I want to make sure when I use this image I can easily use the setup I created in my first Pi.

- I am using a 16GB SD card and I only installed one app. Other than that it is all stock Raspian. But my image file is close to 15GB. I am pretty sure my SD card isn't that full. How can I fix this? I wanna be able to upload this image file to cloud and easily access it from everywhere but 15GBs is just way too big

Open to recommendations. Thanks in advance!

NoobS has a unique Partitioning Scheme and you have not backed up:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wi ... -explained


As stated above buy yourself a USB SDHC Card Reader and a spare SD Card and use the SD Card Copier Tool in Raspbian..


IMO Noobs wastes space, therefore if all you want is Raspbian Stretch with Desktop just forget using Noobs:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/r ... i-desktop/

An 8GB SD Card will be sufficient..

[godvader]

NoobS has a unique Partitioning Scheme and you have not backed up:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wi ... -explained


As stated above buy yourself a USB SDHC Card Reader and a spare SD Card and use the SD Card Copier Tool in Raspbian..


IMO Noobs wastes space, therefore if all you want is Raspbian Stretch with Desktop just forget using Noobs:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/r ... i-desktop/

An 8GB SD Card will be sufficient..

My Raspberry Pi Kit came with noobs preinstalled so I didn't bother changing it. Besides it came with a 16GB SD Card which is more than enough storage for me.

I already own a SD Card reader and have couple SD Cards. After copying all the files to a new SD Card, Can I copy the files to my windows PC from that SD Card?

[KLL]

again, for backup you can copy some files to SD card OR USB stick... and transport also this way to windows PC,

but you can not ( without some tools ) copy file from /home/pi/xxx as that partition is not easy readable by windows.
for that are different ways recommended ( samba shared path ...)

BUT

to make a bootable system SD card must use IMAGE way, read again my above post.

[godvader]

again, for backup you can copy some files to SD card OR USB stick... and transport also this way to windows PC,

but you can not ( without some tools ) copy file from /home/pi/xxx as that partition is not easy readable by windows.
for that are different ways recommended ( samba shared path ...)

BUT

to make a bootable system SD card must use IMAGE way, read again my above post.

Thank you for the recommendations.

To make my problem clear: I have 2 Raspberry Pi's in another country. And I have one in my home. I want to be able to upload the latest version of my raspberry pi to cloud so the people taking care of the other Pi's can download it and easily install it. They are not tech savvy so I need to make things easier for them. That is why I tried creating an image file of my own pi. But the file size was just too big.

Also I heard that the SD Cards do fail occasionally or the files get corrupted. So the image should help in such situations too.

[fruitoftheloom]

again, for backup you can copy some files to SD card OR USB stick... and transport also this way to windows PC,

but you can not ( without some tools ) copy file from /home/pi/xxx as that partition is not easy readable by windows.
for that are different ways recommended ( samba shared path ...)

BUT

to make a bootable system SD card must use IMAGE way, read again my above post.

Thank you for the recommendations.

To make my problem clear: I have 2 Raspberry Pi's in another country. And I have one in my home. I want to be able to upload the latest version of my raspberry pi to cloud so the people taking care of the other Pi's can download it and easily install it. They are not tech savvy so I need to make things easier for them. That is why I tried creating an image file of my own pi. But the file size was just too big.

Also I heard that the SD Cards do fail occasionally or the files get corrupted. So the image should help in such situations too.

The biggest issue with Win32DiskImager is it makes an exact byte size copy and Windows itself does not recognise EXT partitions.

With Raspbian you only have 2 partitions, whilst with NoobS you have several, so what partitions do you shrink ?


This is an old Blog regarding shrinking Raspbian (not using NoobS):

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to- ... -Pi-Image/