If it's a filesystem, it can be backed up using BorgBackup. There are a few different clients but I personally use Vorta on Linux.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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+1 Borgbackup is great, and its deduplication works very well. Vorta works well, and there's also GNOME Pika which has a very simple UI. For servers, I use Borgmatic.
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Borg backup has insane deduping. The first time I used it I thought it was broken because of how much smaller the backup was compared to the original. I used it with vorta GUI.
I am not sure how to combine the task of making a disk image with backing up with borg either on the command line or via one of the GUIs?
Easiest way would be to use borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 '/home/user/sdcardbackup::{now}' /dev/sdX (which I copied from the examples in the documentation). I'm not sure if Vorta has a way to activate --read-special but I suspect not; you can most likely still use it to make the repo and manage archives inside of it though.
Backing up from a command/stdin might also be relevant as an alternative, since that lets you back up more or less anything.
Wow I love this - I never thought of directly backing up block devices like that.
I'm not sure about anything that does rolling backups of full disks, but I have used rdiff-backup for years for rolling backups of individual files. The format for the backup is similar to (and based on) rsync so it's fairly easy to script. For complete servers I just keep a copy of the install image on hand, in a catastrophic drive failure I can do a new installation to a new drive (creating the partitions, grub setup, etc), then restore the latest backup. An alternative might be to use dd and create a full drive image file to use as your starting point in a full recovery.
One thing to keep in mind though is that the backups should NOT contain any system folders like dev or proc that get generated at boot. If possible, when making a starting image with dd, you want the drive to be separate and not part of the running OS, because some folders like dev and var have a basic set of files in place needed for the boot process which may be different than the final version you see after the OS is up and running. That's why I find it easier to just plan around a clean install to new drives when needed.
Thanks I will look at rdiff. I am not sure if rsync is able to "see inside" the *.img files to discern the individual files. If it can then it would be helpful because I could just re-write the same file over and over again and keep backups using rsync or any of the various rsync-derrived tools?
The filesystem will be cold at time of back up because I will need to shut it down, remove the card from the console and put it into my computer's reader so no worries about that.
You’re looking for a block level incremental backup solution. This can either be achieved using filesystem based snapshots (ZFS, BRRFS) or using dedicated programs. I know rdiff-backup , restic and duplicity use block-level diffs, not sure about rsnapshot.
I recommend just backing up the files.
But if you really have to back up the disk image, dd a copy of it, mount the copied image as loopback device, write the loopback filesystem full of /dev/zero, sync, delete the zero file(s), unmount, cp --sparse=always and store the result.
The reason for using the loopback image step is to prevent wearing out the SD card with writing the free space full of zeros every time you make a backup.
There may be an existing tool for this, but I don't remember it.
note to myself and anyone with same problem who finds the thread:
stumbled on psync: A naive tool for syncing partitions using rsync which sounds like it's at lest trying to do this task.
No documentation, no users, no project changes in 6 years.... Will give it a try another time.
I haven't tried such a thing, but I remember ZFS has an option for block deduplication.
So you would set up a ZFS with block deduplication (and probably without compression - try this point out), and then you make your backup images with the dd tool and the correct block size.
Now you make always full copies and have them as normal files but they take only the disk space of the differences.
let me know if I am going about the problem in a wrong way.
I would not say "wrong way". I's fun to think about such things and try them out.
On the other hand I think a FAT32 can have only 32Gb. I would not mind having many of them lying around on my home NAS that has 12 Tb on RAID :-)
hmmm I think this is a bit beyond me; at this point I don't want to create an additional side project. I might learn about the more modern spiffy file systems in a few years.
in a few years.
Never give up :-)