[Tutorial] New way to backup your retro pie

Clyde

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

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.

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.