Do you guys do copies of your Retropie Micro SD for backup?

ChristianG

@mediamogul So does this process pretty much duplicate the whole Micro SD so you can place it on another Micro SD and insert into your Pi and you have your whole arcade setup ?

Thanks!

Sano

Diskimager and dd both do a binary image/clone/dump of the whole SD, so yes.
By rewritting this image on a SD card, you get everything back, including OS, boot partition, files ...

The option 2 only backup roms and configuration files (to a certain extent). You'll have ton reinstall retropie on the SD, and just copy back the files to the RetroPie folder.

ChristianG

@Sano Very cool.

ChristianG

@Sano I am using a 32g sd right now. If I wanted to take my disk image and copy it to a larger card, lets say 64g, would this work?

edmaul69

@ChristianG yes. After you boot up the new larger sd card you need to go into the retropie menu and go into the raspi-config and choose expand file system to use all 64gb of the new card

MrJordaaany

@edmaul69 said in Do you guys do copies of your Retropie Micro SD for backup?:

@ChristianG yes. After you boot up the new larger sd card you need to go into the retropie menu and go into the raspi-config and choose expand file system to use all 64gb of the new card

100% this. It's an easy process. I've jumped from 8gb to 32gb, and am about to jump from 32gb to 64gb soon.

ChristianG

@MrJordaaany So you do a disk image copy to your desktop then burn that image to a new sd card? Is that how its done? Or do you insert both sd cards and copy straight from one to the other?

MrJordaaany

@ChristianG said in Do you guys do copies of your Retropie Micro SD for backup?:

@MrJordaaany So you do a disk image copy to your desktop then burn that image to a new sd card? Is that how its done? Or do you insert both sd cards and copy straight from one to the other?

Hey bud,

So you want to follow the link @mediamogul posted above:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/#making-a-backup-option-1

And download Win32 Disk Imager (if you are windows) and install it.

Then plug in your smaller SD card into your computer, and use Win32 Disk Imager to make full image copy of the SD card using the 'Read' function.

Once it's complete, remove your smaller SD card and plug in the new bigger SD card you will be using from now on. Use the 'Write' function of Win32 Disk Imager to write the backup image you just made of your old card, to your new card.

Once it's done, all you have to do then is expand the file system so you have access to all the space on your new card. I don't have a pi in front of me so I can't exactly remember where it is, other than its under raspi-config

This thread has you covered though:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5229/solved-how-do-i-resize-the-filesystem

cowboyscott

Being a Mac user, I wanted a GUI option to do the full backup and restore. I use ApplePi-Baker. It works up through Mac OS Sierra and I have not had any issues.

Highly recommended.

jamesbeat

Yes, this essentially makes a cloned image of your sd card and stores it as a file on your pc.

If something happens like your sd card becomes corrupted or you mess up your settings really badly, you can just write the image back onto your card and it will like it never happened.

I keep a backup on my pc, and because I had a spare sd card lying around, I flashed the image onto that one too and store it inside my case.

That way if I have people round or something, I can be back in business in less than a minute and can reflash the corrupted card whenever it's convenient.

I haven't had any problems with corruption so far, so I've never had to actually use the backup, but it's nice to have the peace of mind.

RedBatman

@jamesbeat Uh what if you have a 128gb Micro SD, since i used to use a 32gb one which i still have and i'm saving it for a just in case, but could i make a condensed clone of a 128gb one without worry about losing too much space on my PC

MrJordaaany

@RedBatman not much you can do unless you shrink the free space down on your installation. I'm sure there's a Linux command you can run to do that. But then each time you move the image back to your sd card you will have to rememeber to expand the file system again.