How to clone Micro SD Card

[MaxK (Mark)]

@thuva

Is there a way to clone from one SD cart to anther withour staring everything from “0”?

I use Win32DiskImager. I remove the SD card from my RPi4, put it into a USB adapter, plug it into my PC and create an image file of the SD card on my PC. This image file can be written back to a new SD card. Note: the SD cards must be the same size AND you must have enough diskspace on the PC to hold the entire size for the SD card.

I have not tried to make an image of a corrupted SD card; so, I do not know if there will be a read failure when doing this.

@KruseLuds

I am sure there is a better way of doing this but that is how I do a backup from time to time

I like this. But I have a different way (not better) because I have committed to using only SD cards. See my thought here:

SD Card Reliability

There are recommendations on this forum and elsewhere to avoid using SD cards because they are not reliable (e.g., they wear out). Device manufacturers typically measure reliability, under ideal conditions, as meantime between failure (MTBF) for harddisks or the total number of write operations for SDs and SSDs. They also compete on other metrics including speed, storage capacity, price, size, etc. so you can usually find this information if you search for it. SD cards may not be able to do as…