[Tutorial] New way to backup your retro pie

[Unknown]

I found a simpler way to back up all your entire retro pie image.

WHAT YOU NEED

1. One raspberry pi (Any model with the raspbien desktop interface)
2. Two micro SD card to USB adapters
3. One empty micro SD card(with enough capacity for your image)
4. Your micro SD card from your retro pie image
5. A computer mouse.

STEP 1
Plug your SD cards into the adapters, and power up your pi.
STEP 2
Go to the main menu and open up the SD card copier in accessories.
STEP 3
Select the new partitions box.
STEP 4
Copy from the adapter your SD card(the one with your image) to the blank SD card.(This will take a while)
STEP 5
After the copy is complete power your pi off, and remove the SD cards.

Were done! You now have a backup SD card.

[IanDaemon]

The way this is written the process requires four SD cards.

[Unknown]

@IanDaemon I do not understand what you mean. Can you explain?

[mitu]

.. and maybe only 1 sdcard adapter, since your original sdcard (that you plug into your Pi) can fit into the sdcard slot.

[Unknown]

@mitu Would that be running Raspbien from USB? because raspbien lite does not have a SD card copier application, so I don't think that you could do it running the retro pie image as of now.

[mitu]

@Unknown Well, choosing between installing the desktop (and the SD card copier) I think it's easier than having 2 sdcard adapters.

[Clyde]

@Unknown Well, you could use dd to copy an sd card from Retropie's command line.

1. Enter blkid to see a list of all connected block devices and their partitions. Example:

/dev/mmcblk0p1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="C367-3F28" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="e22bcd10-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="retropie" UUID="8988cf8f-d459-476f-9a4a-16c56702dc40" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e22bcd10-02"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="retropie-data" UUID="9463aedb-2ed2-4946-98a6-ab9c63966f8a" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="2c31bca2-b1f4-4466-ab20-3a347852ba2c"

Here, the card in the internal sd slot of my Pi 4 is mmcblk0, and p1 and p2 are its partitions. sda is an usb drive with one partition. A second usb drive would likely become sdb and so on.

2. Clone one block device (let's say sda) onto another (sdb):

sudo dd status=progress bs=4m if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

sudo is needed for root access rights to the raw devices.
status=progress will display the ongoing progress.
bs = block size (4 MB for more speed)
if = input file (or block device, since all devices in Linux are files)
of = output file

Be very careful with the device names, though. Like most Linux commands, dd will do whatever you tell it to without warning or remorse. So if you're careless, you might overwrite your original with the backup.

[Clyde]

@mitu said in [Tutorial] New way to backup your retro pie:

@Unknown Well, choosing between installing the desktop (and the SD card copier) I think it's easier than having 2 sdcard adapters.

But then you'd clone the system card from within the running system, right? I remember this being discouraged in many backup guides, but I don't know how much of a problem this really is.

[Unknown]

@Clyde @mitu Seems that there are several more ways mentioned here to backup your retropie image. Maybe this should be added to the Docs.

[Unknown]

@mitu The desktop comes with the SD card copier installed.

[mitu]

@Unknown said in [Tutorial] New way to backup your retro pie:

@mitu The desktop comes with the SD card copier installed.

Sure, but we don't use the Raspbian Desktop image and I assume most users don't install the desktop when using RetroPie.

[Unknown]

@mitu I meant that you would copy it with another raspberry pi, not the one that you use for your retropie system. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear.

[Unknown]

@mitu I see you have moved this, could you explain what that means?

[mitu]

The Ideas and development category is more appropriate for this topic.

[windg]

Is a big plus to not have the roms in the sd card but to an external disk. i am using this approach one year now and i have to back up only the retroarch.cfg and the gamepad.cfg files.

[Unknown]

@windg The backup would still run roms off your drive.