How do you backup your entire SD Card - MAC OS

Installation
1

Wonder if any of you can give me any ideas and examples on how you backup your SD Card.
I’ve been using ‘dd’ for other projects but for some reason I am not having any success backing up my HA card.

My syntax is usually like this:
sudo dd bs=1m if=/dev/rdisk2 of=~/Desktop/HASSserver_Basic_Zwave.img

Currently my backup finishes in a few seconds and takes the same amount of time to restore to another card. Are there more than 1 partition on this card? (maybe I am only backing up the boot partition) but have no idea on how to do the entire disk.

Any help would be great, since I am a noob with HA I would rather backup every so often because I am bound to mess it up as I experiment.

2

rdisk = raw disk. In your case, rdisk2 is the entire card, all partitions included.

3

Thanks roddie
So it would seem like I have the right syntax but it’s not working as it should (nor like any other projects that I backed up) Any other better way to back up an exact image of my card in order to restore later?

4

@berniebl That’s pretty much how it’s done – See this link for more details:

5

Yep, that’s how I’ve been doing it for more than a couple of hundred backup for other projects, but no go for HA. Wonder why

6

Have a look at ApplePi-Baker:

I’m using this flawlessly.
The site is in Dutch but program is in English.

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7

Thanks to all, but my better solution was to use ApplePi Baker as suggested above.
I was able to redo my dd command and left out the Block Space (bs=1) and that worked but was extremely slow. So now using ApplePi … thanks for the suggestion

8

Here’s an English version: http://www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/macosx-apple-pi-baker/

9

Thanks again,
ApplePi Baker did work well and it also showed me the reason why I was not able to complete my task with ‘dd’.
Seems like not all SD cards are created equal, not even from the same manufacturer and same brand. The issue that I was getting was that the target card seems to have a few less bytes. ApplePi Baker let me know that this was an issue, something I never saw with ‘dd’. Copying to a larger card worked well also.

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