User Rating: 4 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Inactive

raspiBackup helps to create backups of a running Raspberry with no shutdown or manual intervention which means your can save or clone your SD card during normal operation. An exported root partition will be saved too. Important services will be stopped just before starting the backup and are started again when the backup finished. Any device which can be mounted on Linux can be used as backupspace (USB disk, USB stick, nfs, samba, sshfs, ...). The backup image can be created with dd, tar or rsync using hardlinks. Restore is possible on Windows or Linux. Source Raspbian may have been installed on SD card only or the boot partition may be on SD card and the root partition on an external USB device like USB SSD or USB stick. Raspbian installed on an USB device only using USB boot mode is also supported

 

User Rating: 4 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Inactive

Purpose of this page is to explain step by step how to use raspiBackup to create a backup imediately and how configure raspiBackup in 5 minutes to create a backup of your Raspberry on a regular base. This page describes for different platforms (Linux, Mac or Windows) how to restore the backup. After testing the backup and restore the next step should be to check which services have to be stopped before the backup starts. Finally cron (starting with Installer 0.4.8 systemd timer) should be configured to start raspiBackup on a regular base. Later on when you have some spare time read this page carefully to check which additional features of raspiBackup are useful for you and update the raspiBackup configuration accordingly. In any case it's strongly recommended to read the FAQ. The raspiBackup installer can be used to uninstall raspiBackup completely if for some reasons raspiBackup does not meet your requirements.

Note:  In 5 minutes raspiBackup will be installed and configured if you have basic Linux knowledge. Otherwise you will need more time even the installer helps to create a basic raspiBackup configuration - unfortunately.

User Rating: 4 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Inactive

Frequent asked questions about raspiBackup. Every new user of raspiBackup should read all questions and answers.

User Rating: 5 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Active

There exist three types of messages:

1) Informational  - Messagenumber ends with I

2) Warning - Messagenumber ends with W

3) Error - Messagenumber ends with E

Most errormessages of raspiBackup give detailed information about the root cause. Sometimes it's required to get additional information in order to get rid of them. raspiBackup has about 200 errormessages and it's so boring to explain all of them here. If you miss a message first use your search engine and serach for the message number. if you still don't find an answer add the message text in a comment at the end of the page and the message with more detailed explanations will be addded on this page. That way the most common raspiBackup messages will show up on this page.

Messages in the number range from 0-999 are written by raspiBackup. Messages from 1000-1999 are written by sample plugins. All other number ranges are custom plugin messages.

In addition raspiBackup terminates with an error code which oints to the root cause.  A list of error codes is available at the end of this page.

If the information for a message does'nt help just use your seach engine to search for the message number (RBK....).

 

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

raspiBackup creates on a regular base backups and keeps a configurable number of backups which can be restored if needed. A lot of folks want to have the latest backup restored already on a second device which can be bootet immediately if the system fails for some reasons to reduce the downtime of the system.  raspiBackup doesn't support to create a clone. But it's possible with a small helper tool which executes a restore just after the backup. If rsync as the backup type is used the restore is actually no restore but a synchronization of the changes between the last restored backup and latest backup which is in general very fast.

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

I recently had to restore a backup created by a rsync backup created by raspiBackup because my SD card died. The restore was successfull but NetworkManager didn't start :-(. With sudo journalctl -n 100 -u NetworkManager.service I detected the error message

/usr/sbin/NetworkManager: error while loading shared libraries: libhogweed.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It took me a while to find the root cause of the issue. Finally it's not an issue with raspiBackup but with librtmp1 and the way it's packaged in RaspbianOS.

 

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

If there is no specific question about raspiBackup to be asked on the respective website, general questions can be asked here. If there is a special page for the question, it will be referred to and

after the question was asked there again, answered there.

User Rating: 5 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Active

10 years ago today the first version of raspiBackup was stored in my local cvs.

revision 1.1
date: 2013-08-07 21:28:14 +0200; author: framp; state: Exp; commitid: 10052029FC71A98602F;
Initial version
=============================================================================

 

This cvs unfortunately no longer exists because it would be interesting to see how the script has changed over the 10 years. Initially there were about 50 lines of code. Today raspiBackup has about 8000 lines of code.

Update 5/2025: The wayback machine has a copy from 2013/6 and there I found an initial version or raspiBackup. You can find it here. Actually this version has 314 LOCs instead of 50.

 

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive
raspiBackup has a new logo. Friendly forum members from the German Raspberry forum helped me to create one.
 
Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

The backup directory created by raspiBackup contains all information required to restore this backup also manually with standard Linux tools. The following page describes how to restore a normal tgz backup.

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

An agile user of raspiBackup - Franjo-G - wrote a very convenient tool called raspiBackupDialog In a dialog driven way the most used options for backup and restore are queried. raspiBackup snapshots are supported. In particular the restore is very easy: You get a list of all existing backups and can select which one to use for the restore.

 

Star InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar InactiveStar Inactive

raspiBackup allows to create a kind of snapshot with option -M. It's a normal backup with two special properties:

  1. Snapshots will not be deleted by the selected backup strategy and will stay there until they are manually deleted.
  2. Snapshots have a description which is the parameter for option -M. This description is appended at the end of the backup directory name.

This allows to create a snapshot besides the usual backup and you can use the description to remember the purpose of the snapshot. That's convenient if you plan a software update or any other major change of your system. If the update fails then you can restore the snapshot easily and start over. If the update was successful delete the snapshot in the backup directory.

 

There is also a Youtube video available which explains raspiBackup snapshots and includes a demo.

Attention 

There exists now a complete new raspiBackup documentation that replaces all raspiBackup documention on this website.

User Rating: 5 / 5

Star ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar ActiveStar Active
 

Invocationsyntax and -options

raspiBackup has to be invoked as user root or with sudo. The invocation syntax is

raspiBackup.sh Option1 Option2 Option3 ... backupdirectory 
and starting with Release 0.6.6 you can omit the extension .sh
 

raspiBackup Option1 Option2 Option3 ... backupdirectory