Periodically back up Raspbian itself with Rsync

[Fieel]

Hello,

basically, i want to create a backup of raspbian itself. I found an interesting StackOverflow post which seems perfect but it's quite old, here it is: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q ... of-itself/

Any suggestions or ideas, did someone ever do this? I'd love to hear some stories and way to approach this problem.

[wh7qq]

If you are running the current Stretch, or even Jessie (older) the easiest way to back up an RPi is with the "SD Card Copier" utility in the main desktop menu. For those of us who don't backup on a frequent basis, this is a good bet because it is easy to create a new uSD card exactly as it was setup at the last copy. That may not be current enough for many and it suffers the disadvantage of copying the entire uSD card every time which would be time consuming and silly if you do very frequent backups.

That is where rsync comes in...it will do incremental backups...only what has changed since the last backup. It can be set up as a cron job to be done automatically when the computer users are asleep or otherwise occupied. Sorry to say, I can't help you with that...it is a bit complicated and I have never gotten into it in detail. I believe there is a gnome GUI version as well that may be easier to use.

[zurdar]

Google for raspiBackup. Had the same problem to solve and instaled it today. Although it needs some reading before use it seems to be a perfect solution for frequent backups.

[Fieel]

If you are running the current Stretch, or even Jessie (older) the easiest way to back up an RPi is with the "SD Card Copier" utility in the main desktop menu. For those of us who don't backup on a frequent basis, this is a good bet because it is easy to create a new uSD card exactly as it was setup at the last copy. That may not be current enough for many and it suffers the disadvantage of copying the entire uSD card every time which would be time consuming and silly if you do very frequent backups.

That is where rsync comes in...it will do incremental backups...only what has changed since the last backup. It can be set up as a cron job to be done automatically when the computer users are asleep or otherwise occupied. Sorry to say, I can't help you with that...it is a bit complicated and I have never gotten into it in detail. I believe there is a gnome GUI version as well that may be easier to use.

I'm running a CLI only installation. I'm not using any kind of graphical or desktop environment, my raspberry is headless and i only handle it through ssh and command line.

[Fieel]

Google for raspiBackup. Had the same problem to solve and instaled it today. Although it needs some reading before use it seems to be a perfect solution for frequent backups.

I'm trying hard to understand how that works. It says it uses dd, rsync etc. etc. How come? I just want a rsync script and that's it

[zurdar]

It is a script that can use different backup methods - dd, tar or rsync. It have simple configuration file and configured once will work without your attention only sending informational emails after every backup.
After install it will ask you couple of questions and that's it. Believe me - it's worth this little effort of reading at least Quick guide - https://www.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/en/quickstart-rbk. If you'll have any questions developer, Framp, answers almost instantly.

[framp]

I just stumbled upon this thread. If you face any issues with raspiBackup or have any questions just create an issue on github https://github.com/framps/raspiBackup/issues or ask your question in a comment on the website.