Usage of raspiBackup within openHABian

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
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  • Platform information:
    • Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4
    • OS: openHABian v1.7.5
    • Java Runtime Environment: JR11
    • openHAB version: v3.4.2

Hey folks,
has anyone experiences with raspiBackup to backup an openHABian running at RP4 (please see this discussion)?

Of course there are some integrated backup possibilities in openHABian, but nothing seems to me to fit like raspiBackup and I have used raspiBackup some years ago and it worked like a charm on a Raspbian distribution. So I would like to use it again :slight_smile:

But there are some topics I would like to clarify before.

  1. Is it possible to use raspiBackup completely in parallel (background) to my running openHABian system?
  2. Which processes do I have to stop before the backup and restart afterwards?
  3. In the documentation it tells me:

NO Do-It-Yourself mirroring
Note you must NOT use dd or any other tool such as ‘Win32 disk imager’ to copy an SD card or partition on your own. If you do and boot with source and destination cards plugged in, they will have the same partition IDs and this will likely mess up things and can irreversibly devastate your whole system. Use the blkid command in shell to see those IDs. This also means you must not take mirrors of the mirror. Also be aware that only the first two partitions are mirrored - the storage (3rd) partition will never be mirrored even if you have set that up for use as your backup area.

So what does it mean and where should I keep an eye on? Maybe anyone has some experiences with raspiBackup here in this community :slight_smile:

Best Regards!

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I did use raspiBackup for quite a while with openHAB (sd card setup and later with an ssd) in a standard setup with tar archives.
I never stopped any services.
I had to restore my system twice and never encountered any problems.
Support in the raspiBackup forum is amazing.

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Sounds good, so it seems to work properly :+1:

But are you not afraid of doing a backup in a running system? I mean in the meantime there could be database writes or config changes which have to be consistent to each other…

And yes, the raspiBackup community is great :relaxed:

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Nope.
If you are, just stop all your running services in regards to openHAB prior to a backup :grinning:
I strongly recommend to just try it out: make a backup, put in a new sd card, make a restore.
I had never any problems in doing so.