Question About my Backup Images

AlphaBetaPie

I need to create incremental backup images of my various Retropie configurations as I go (so when I reach the point I break something, I can just go backwards one or two steps). I'm using Win32DiskImager to do this. But I've noticed that if I backup a 64gig card, instead of just imaging the used portion of RetroPie (which is only a few hundred megabytes), it has to create an entire 64gig ISO on my desktop of all that empty space. Since I need multiple backups, this is going to take up a lot of room on my HDD for nothing.

So I have two questions...

Do I have to always image the entire SD card, even if unused, to ensure I get a 1:1 copy that will seamlessly be restored when I use a program like Etcher to burn the image to a new SD card later?
Also, if I were to give this image to others to burn to a fresh SD card, does the gig size have to match perfectly? Meaning, what if I have a 64gig image and they try to burn it to a 256gig SD card?

dankcushions

@alphabetapie said in Question About my Backup Images:

instead of just imaging the used portion of RetroPie (which is only a few hundred megabytes)

how are you calculating this? a retropie installation should be several gigs.

it has to create an entire 64gig ISO on my desktop of all that empty space. Since I need multiple backups, this is going to take up a lot of room on my HDD for nothing.

https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink

Do I have to always image the entire SD card, even if unused, to ensure I get a 1:1 copy that will seamlessly be restored when I use a program like Etcher to burn the image to a new SD card later?

it depends what you're changing - you could backup the individual configuration files you've changed.

Also, if I were to give this image to others to burn to a fresh SD card, does the gig size have to match perfectly? Meaning, what if I have a 64gig image and they try to burn it to a 256gig SD card?

the image has to be less than or equal to the size of the new card. you can expand the file system to consume any extra space on the card (pishrunk-images will do this automatically)