Raspbian backup without second computer

[hedeon]

Hi.

I was just wondering how to make backup of raspberry pi without using any other computer. Most of the tutorials I have found are referring to making SDcard image via windows/linux/mac. I don't want to do this this way, say my raspberry is in remote location, and I want to do this through SSH, to attached HDD.
Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[stevepdp]

If your Raspberry Pi is in a remote location, with attached storage, then it's probably best to use something like rsync or simpler in my opinion, tar.

This will get you started with the tar option.

If you then want to send those tarballs to your local workstation, you could use an SFTP client to browse the remote storage and download files. You've already got SSH enabled and SFTP uses SSH.

I don't believe it's possible to dd the filesystem while it's running. I may be wrong though

Hope this helps.

[PiGraham]

Once you have the Pi running in the first place you can make another bootable SD card on the Pi by downloading NOOBS to it.
You need a USB SD card reader and a spare SD card.
If you have any large USB storage device you can copy an SD card in the USB SD card reader to a backup device.
With a second bootable SD card you can recover the sytem from backup by putting the reserve SD card into the system, booting and copying from the cabckup to a new or corrupted SD card.

If you don't have a USB SD card reader you will won't be able to restore from backup if your main card fails, unless you can get access to another computer.

[Richard-TX]

I use rsync. Works very well. I use rsync for all my Linux computers.