@KN4THX Exactly. I wouldn't buy a ssd drive just for a Pi, but when I upgrade the ssd on my main pc, then I could use the older one.

@mitu The device setup I was thinking would be like this on the raspberry pi USB1: Usb image boot, raspbian? smaller. Micro-SDslot: unformatted new microsd (the target of the image write) USB2: Usb microsd adapter (the source of the image write) rpi-clone; and I thought I made it sound confusing.

@simpleethat Well, my suggestion is to compress all of your roms into zip or 7z format (as the emulators support) for use on your Pi and to just store them in that format on your NAS. This way they are maximally usable on your Pi should you need to copy them back over. The amount of extra compression you can get by compressing everything into giant 7z files is fairly small in most cases. There are some roms that can't really be compressed for use by emulators, mostly bin and ISOs. However, most of the emulators also support a compressed format for these types of file (chd, pbp, etc). All the time, effort, and electricity you spend compressing files to eek out a few GB of storage space just isn't worth it.

I’ve used this to copy from a 128g card to a 64g one before to create another Retropie for someone. Worked fine for me apart from having to run it twice just to make sure everything really was copied, but that was just a delta copy then. https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone I plugged the other SD card into a USB adapter and just let it run overnight as I was close to about 60g in actual use.

@Retribution But don't forget that an online backup isn't full under your control and access. It may be that just when you need it, your internet connection doesn't work or the site isn't available. Also, if you happen to have illegal ROMs, I'd think twice before uploading them to a third-party's server.

Thanks, tried Apple Pie Baker back in the days but thought it was for creating images. Will check it out!

@mppsan If the system you're copying to has also RetroPie, chances are the system is loading you USB pendrive in the ROMs folder and you're just re-copying the files on the usb. Disable the USB mount service from the RetroPie-Setup script and then mount the USB pendrive manually from the command line.

@mitu Thank you! I can't believe I didn't stumble upon those in my search.

@mitu Thanks a lot. This saves me a lot of time, preparing an rsync just for those folders and ignoring entirely /usr, /bin, etc. I also noticed the existence of /home/pi/.emulationstation that includes stuff like the "scraped" game images, but I found it to be a link to /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation . I also noticed that the .state files are stored inside the "roms" folders, in the same subfolder than the rom itself. Thanks and best regards.

@mitu Okay ,thanks for your help :)

Thankyou sir!

@webz0r I'm not sure how you would do this, but you don't need to worry about keeping the gamelist.xml in alphabetical order.

@Dalrint said in So I'm trying to back up my retropie SD Card...: One is a drive in a format windows keeps asking to reformat ( G: ) Windows can't read the Linux file system on the second partition, because of Microsoft's worldview of "there are no other systems next to ours". That said, asking to format an unknown partition goes beyond bad manners in my opinion, as it can cause serious data loss for the user. @Dalrint said in So I'm trying to back up my retropie SD Card...: So I tried it without worrying about it, yeah. And it did indeed do that! Awesome. Did you expand the filesystem to the bigger SD card after the migration? If not, see these instructions how to do it.

@bobharris Hi, I am upgrading because I figured there will have been performance improvements that would perhaps help with various emulators. Have decided to make a full img backup, then will try doing the upgrade within Retropie and see how I get on - if it messes up for any reason I will just write my original image back and use that version, spending ages trying to get it all up and running again seems like a lot of work. I also have to build a zero from scratch for a handheld project so I have plenty to do at the moment - thanks for the replies guys!

@thedatacereal perfect! Thank you.

I only have pics scraped. I used the default scraper, so I will backup my roms folder and the mentioned paths, I hope they are accesible in windows over the network . :)