In a previous post I showed how to setup a working NFS drive and how to keep the shared folder available the Raspberry Pi reboots. NFS – Connecting a Raspberry Pi to a Synology Nas
Now it’s time to do backups of my little pi(s). pi, pis, pies, whatever. The MicroSD cards that go in a Raspberry Pi are only good for a certain number of read/writes and a very active program can chew one up, so backups are a must. Another option is to move the boot drive to an SSD. You could also boot from a usb flash drive, though a controversy rages over if it ends up being better than a MicroSD.
My criteria for a good backup solution
- Regular backups that I can schedule and automatically save to my NAS.
- Full image backups. If I have to do a recovery, I want to burn the image to a new MicroSD card, pop it in and just have it work..
- They have to be made while the machine is hot/running. I won’t take the time to pull the Raspberry Pi’s offline. I know me and I’ll never do do manual backups.
What’s the answer?
In 2019 a guy, RONR, came up with the ability to do all the things above automagically.
There are a few scripts to run. Personally I won’t run something I don’t understand, at least in concept. I took the time watch the linked video, go through the walkthroughs, paste the command lines in a text file, review then run individually. Learning is part of the fun right? Of course by the time I got to the third pi our of seven, I just copy and pasted the code.
For the tutorials, I didn’t follow any of them straight through. They all have deviations, additional material, etc. I picked and chose what to use from each of them and stitched together my own solution.
With so many guides and resources on the internet, I don’t really write guides, especially if I can point to people who have written them well. I don’t have the patience.
The resources:
- The OG article: Image File Utilities
- A 10 minute video: Live Backup Running Raspberry Pi | Managing Raspberry Pi
- A well written article & walkthrough: How to make a live backup of your Raspberry Pi Ubuntu/Raspberry Pi OS Server to create live bootable ISO Images on an external drive
- A walkthrough & even better written article: Backup a running Raspberry Pi over the network
I don’t use the OG, the others are written better, sorry Ron.
The video is a great walkthrough and explanation of what is going on. Really great if you want to learn what you are doing. I started with the video. Have fun first, learn second, have something I can use third.
Link 3 goes through creating a backup usb drive. I’m on a network drive I’d already set up (see my NFS article), so I skipped down to the part about the installation and setup on the pi. There are also great instructions on how to use a chron job to make the backups automatic and as differentials, vs brand new backups every time.
Link 4 a setup of up a Truenas first, then the backup info. I found the backup info in Link 4 about half way down. The code is organized well, each to just cut and paste.
The process I follow, I learned from the video. I use link 4 to install and setup the image. I then use to Link 3 for the nightly, weekly and monthly chron jobs. Make sure to change the paths, names, etc. to what you want.
I tested one pi. It worked so then I checked on the chron job for a week to make sure it ran right. It runs nightly and since they are incremental, the job shouldn’t be to hard on the SD. I only expect a few MB a night for most of my pies.
I burn an image every now and then to test, just to stay on top of it. I have yet to have a problem.
Items I did myself / modifications:
- I created a single, shared folder and connected all the pies to it. NFS – Connecting a Raspberry Pi to a Synology Nas
- I made subfolders for each pi inside the shared folder and gave a descriptive, if not pedantic title. wordpress, freepbx, etc.
- I had to edit some of the paths to match mine. I also had to edit the paths for the chron jobs.
The image is only of the data on the drive. only use 4 gigs? the image is 4 gigs. Incremental backups will fill this up and the image will not expand, causing errors. I added extra space for growth, 5 gigs for everything but the desktop, I gave it 10 gigs. I don’t expect any to grow appreciably but wanted to leave some room, just to be safe.
Along with the provided commands, I setup a command list of my own, mostly to use as a cut and paste:
To setup one back up I’m going to:
- Make mount my backup drive
- Test the mount
- Make the directory to hold the back up (also test to see if I can write to the share)
- Unmount the drive
- Put the drive in /etc/fstab so it will attach at boot
- Reload the deamon to see the changes to fstab
- Run a mount -a to test the fstab
- Install the backup software as per the link –
- Make a backup
- Copy the backup to the rest of the days of the week
- Make the chron job
- Check the chron job
The process with my comments
- Mount Test
- sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.2.32:/volume1/pibak /mnt/pibak
- Test the mount & Make the directory to hold the back up (also test to see if I can write to the share)
- Unmount the drive
- sudo umount /mnt/pibak
- Put the drive in /etc/fstab so it will attach at boot
- sudo nano /etc/fstab
- Copy
- #backup to NAS
- 192.168.2.32:/volume1/pibak /mnt/pibak nfs auto,rw,bg,hard,intr 0 0
- Reload the deamon to have the computer see the changes to fstab
- sudo systemctl daemon-reload
- Run a mount -a to test the fstab
- sudo mount -a
- ** Install software
- Make backup as per the guide
- sudo image-backup –initial /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailymonwp.img,,5000
- Copy the backup to the rest of the days of the week / repeat until all days are copied
- cp /mnt/pibak/wordpress/ dailymonwp.img wordpress/ dailytueswp.img
- sudo mkdir /mnt/pibak/wordpress/
Setup daily backups
sudo crontab -e
# Incremental Raspberry Pi for every day – 5:15 am; 0=sunday
15 5 * * 0 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailysunwp.img
15 5 * * 1 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailymonwp.img
15 5 * * 2 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailytueswp.img
15 5 * * 3 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailywedwp.img
15 5 * * 4 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailythurwp.img
15 5 * * 5 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailyfriwp.img
15 5 * * 6 /usr/local/bin/image-backup /mnt/pibak/wordpress/dailysatwp.img