SD Clone - Have anyone tried the SD Cloner?

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
,
1

Hey,

Right now my openHab seems to run pretty stable and I wan’t to make a backup of it, so I can start playing with some other bindings, rules and so on. So far I’ve been copying all my files under the conf library and then manually installed all bindings, setting up the paperui (interface etc.).

So I was thinking, what if I could just load the working image back on, if I ended up messing something, then I wouldn’t have to spend all the time with the other things. I looked through the forums here and there are many nice solutions, but some of them looks like you need to know a bit more about the Linux system than I do :(.
Finally I ended up on this site: https://twocanoes.com/products/mac/sd-clone/ and I saw some videos, which actually looked like it was pretty easy. To me it looks like you can insert the working SD card to you MAC and then open the SD Cloner software, then Shrink it using the tool, afterwards do the backup to an image. Then afterwards you can extend the sd card again, and then load the image back (or format it before you do).

This should prevent the issues I’ve been having with my w32diskimage software on Windows, that tells me that the SD card doesn’t have enough space, even though it is the same size and brand. I know that no SD card is the same unless they are from the same batch (you can’t even be sure).

Have anyone else been using this software on their MAC? Does it really work?
I will try to download later, but if someone else is using it I would like to know the pros and cons :slight_smile:

Thanks :smiley:

2

On a Mac, you may simply use the on-board Disk Utility to create an image (dmg) from your SD card.

  1. Launch Disk Utility
  2. Right-click the SD card (not the reader)
  3. Select Image from “boot” (or whichever name it has)
  4. You can leave the defaults or select “compressed” to save a bit of disk space

Disk Utility then creates a disk image file (dmg) from your SD card.

3

What about the size then? Will I not end up with the img. file being to large for the new SD card I want it on to?

4

To be honest, I haven’t tried that, but I don’t think it would be a problem.

As a last resort, you can always mount the disk image on your Mac, then copy the files manually to the card.

5

So I downloaded the software described in the first post and I must say I’m very satisfied. It does exactly what I was hoping for. I know that the software itself costs a nearly 40 bucks and might be very easy to do using some command lines on the rpi. Right now with the current skills this is what I need.

It shrinks the partition so that the image ends up only being around 2,5Gb even though the card is 32Gb (29.28).
After that I just insert whatever card I have (needs to bigger than the actual image of course) - in this case I had a similar, and then it started to restore the image and then it extended the partition to whatever size is left on the SD Card.

I did a few tests to different SD cards (same brand and size though) but it was working and openHAB started up just fine and everything seems to be running smooth :).